


Hermitage for Children and Liars

by Gyakugire, sybilius, tartpants, veeraha



Series: Black Beats and Low Leads [2]
Category: Death Note, Death Note: Another Note
Genre: Actual plot despite there being some porn, Alley Sex, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Artifact Based, Blow Jobs, Drug Dealing, Drug Use, Drug related death, Explicit Language, F/M, Graphic depiction of drug-related death, Hallucinations, Hand Jobs, L is a speedfreak, M/M, Male Slash, Minor committing illegal acts, Mystery, Photographs, Post A's Death, Pre LABB Murder Cases, Pre-Deathnote, Rimming, Roleplay to Fic, Rough Sex, Russia, Semi-Public Sex, Suicide mention, Terrorism mention, Wammy's Era, diary entries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 08:20:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 58,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7927528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gyakugire/pseuds/Gyakugire, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/pseuds/sybilius, https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartpants/pseuds/tartpants, https://archiveofourown.org/users/veeraha/pseuds/veeraha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A’s death opens a myriad of questions that B and L hope to find answers to in St. Petersburg, Russia. While investigating, they run across the fiery orphan-boy Mihael Keehl, too smart to be a normal street urchin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. May 1998, Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the second installment from 'Black Beats and Low Leads', an artifact-based roleplay and collaborative storytelling project about the World's Greatest Detective and his allies. Before reading this fic, we recommend that you read the first in the series, "Lost a Heart in Vegas."
> 
> 'Black Beats and Low Leads' takes place in three arcs-- this story takes place in June 1998, several years before the LABB murder cases. Stories within the first arc (Young A, B, and L) and the third arc (Death Note Era/Post LABB) will be added as they are developed.
> 
> If you wish to keep up with 'Black Beats and Low Leads' in real time, the player blogs can be found on tumblr, and the roleplay organized in the "beats log". At the end of a beat, the writing and artifacts will be compiled into a chapters/stories such as this one.
> 
> L: lowlawliet.tumblr.com (written by Tartpants)  
> B: noirberryjam.tumblr.com (written by Sybilius)  
> Mello: sirota-krysa.tumblr.com (written by Gyakugire)  
> A: alpha-aeterna.tumblr.com (written by Raconteur-Incognito)
> 
> Hope you enjoy this story, and please leave a comment with your thoughts!

**January 1998 (Prelude)**

 

_Et Benedictus, Mello’s Journal_ [do not edit or repost]

 

* * *

 

**May 15, 1998, St Petersburg, Abandoned Schoolhouse**

 

Mello wakes up screaming “ _Mom! Mom!”_ at the top of his lungs, and the boy next to him punches him and hissed to shut the fuck up, because it’s late, and they don’t get that much time to sleep.

At least he had a fucking chance to meet his parents, the boy spits, but Mello’s in tears, sobbing and whimpering into the ground, arms wrapped around his waist while he curls into himself. It hurts. His stomach’s bruised and the side of his face is stinging, because this boy is so much older than him, and can hit so _hard_ that it makes his vision flash black and adrenaline pool in the back of his throat.

He thinks he’ll die.

He’s not really sure if he minds.

He’s hungry, too.

Mello whimpers again, and this time, the boy grabs him by the shoulders and spits in his face.

Disgusting.

He wants to scream and cry and just get the fuck _out_ because this is awful, this is terrible, no one can survive this.

And not everyone does.

The night ticks on, with shadows dancing in every corner of the room. Rain pelts against molding windows, a  dull roar in his ears. Even surrounded by other homeless children, he feels overwhelmingly, destructively, desperately alone.

He tries to think of his mother.

All he can see is the bullets in her chest, and blood pouring from her ears. She _flailed_ on the ground, her nervous system giving its last effort to try and stay afloat. Probably, she had been dead by then, but her body twitched, writhing for a split second as her limbs shut down. He watched from around the corner, clutching his shirt into balls between his fingers. He ran. He saw her eyes, wide, piercing blue staring at him, mouth moving, sputtering for that last split second before she just _collapsed_.

He thinks of his father.

He feels sick.

_It was his fault._

_This_ is his fault.

Realization hits Mello in the pit of his stomach, harsher than any of the swings that other boy had taken at him. His father had done this.

Got his hands on mercury, a couple of tools to open up the car, and that was it.

For what? He still doesn’t understand what these words mean, and the woman in the library won’t let him look in the books for an answer. The specifics don’t matter–the blame still sits the same.

Mello curls his knees into himself, and he bites his tongue to pull his mind out of the nightmare he’s creating for himself.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Mello’s Possessions, May 1998_ [do not edit or repost]

_-Safety Pin (given to Peter for ear piercing, May 20th)_

_-Chocolate Wrapper (lost/repurposed, May 15th)_

_-Rosary_

_-Crow feathers (given to librarian, May 7th)_

_-Journal_

_-Gift Bow (lost, May 4th)_

* * *

 

**May 31, 1998**

Peter’s a son of a bitch, but that’s no big deal.

In the winter, he curls up next to Mello underneath a thick blanket they stole from a shop down the street. Peter’s got the sticky fingers, Mello’s just good at keeping watch. In a few years, he’ll be just as good. But that’s still a while from now, and he’s still worrying about tomorrow.

Peter’s real cool, and everyone that looks at him knows not to fuck with him. Mello’s grateful, because he’s given that same sort of look. He says it’s thanks to Peter.

Peter says it’s because Mello’s got one hell of a nasty look in his eyes.

He was fifteen, and he’d got this shit on his arms that looked kind of like scabs all the way from his wrist up to the crook of his elbow, with specs of green and yellow everywhere in between. Mello loved him, a thick sense of childhood adoration and borderline worship.

And hell, Peter was just trying to get on like the rest of them, but at least he’d had the means to do so.

And a little extra for kicks, he’d like to say.

For spring, they’d ditched the blanket in a dumpster, and rolled up their pants to make shorts.

On May 31st, Peter turned up dead in a tunnel beneath the veins of the city.

He didn’t get a grave, so Mello pretended. On the streets, walking aimlessly through a bleary, foggy evening, he picked out spots that reminded him of his friend, and he’d stop, say a prayer, and move on. It wasn’t for another year that he understood what “track lines” were.

Mello rubs his hands together, and pulls his thin jacket around himself. The days were warm but the evenings were cool. Tucked out of sight down the way of a street rarely traveled, he shuts his eyes and tries to lead himself to sleep. The air stings his ears, and he dips his face down, an exhausted Hail Mary tumbling from his lips.


	2. June 1-3, 1998

 

* * *

 

 

**June 1 1998**

_A is for Abstract Anxiety_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

 

**June 2, 1998**

There were a ton of situations where B would have killed for a good partner, in both contexts of the word.

Police chase, well. Might have been better to field this one alone.

Following the Vegas case, B had packed up quietly, let Lawliet tie up the loose ends and started making plans for unraveling A’s story. He hadn’t slept much, kept seeing caved-in skulls with a bullet hole in his nightmares, but then, he also hadn’t felt as shitty as he would have expected, after parting ways with Lawliet.

 

_A Connection Made_ [do not edit or repost]

 

God knows he should have seen it coming when a familiar figure was squatting on the seat next to him when he caught a connection out of LAX.

They didn’t say much, but L walked them over to a pair of first class seats and asked where B was planning to start. B told him about A’s quiet apartment over a jar of raspberry chocolate jam from the duty-free, fell asleep on him just as they crossed over New York. It felt so damn natural that B woke up wanting to clutch at Lawliet, tight to never let go, but settled for squeezing his hand and thinking deeply about the significance of the moment.

_You need me, Lawliet. And this time, I’m going to make sure you know why._

There would hopefully be time for that after they narrowly avoid getting arrested for B&E.

A’s apartment in St. Petersburg is a pretty, clean place on first floor of a hulking Brutalist skyscraper; easy enough to pick the lock and take a look around, but not one that B would have expected this level of security from. They’ve barely made it into the vestibule when alarms start to sound and Lawliet nearly jumps out of his skin.

 _I thought you said you went here to unwind, Acey?_ Sure as hell didn’t seem that way with the amount of sensors B noted before they hightailed it out of there. Russian law enforcement was far too quick on the draw to take chances with.

Hence, police chase.

“Shit,” B drawls as he weaves the motorcycle in and out of the narrow streets, sirens ringing in their ears. _A didn’t make it sound like there was anything sensitive in the apartment– but then again, it’s not like she invited me up either._ Lawliet’s arms tighten around his ribcage as they round the corner to another set of blinking lights and screeching wheels, “Yeah, I see them, I see them.”

* * *

 

B drives with sheer recklessness, taking the curves at speeds so high it’s a wonder they don’t spin out. He loves to drive fast no matter the circumstances, but L’s far-off death date probably gives him even more reason to throw caution into the fire. L keeps his chest curved tight against B’s spine so that their weight is evenly distributed, but he can’t really tell which of their hearts is thumping harder.

The police are in boxy vehicles that might have some power on the open road, but can’t hope to keep up with a motorbike that can zip around the thick of traffic, or barrel through a square, sending terrified pigeons up in droves. They finally lose the police for good in an alley, where they pull over and wait until they haven’t heard the sirens for fifteen minutes. Then they walk the bike back in the general direction of their hotel, knowing they’ll be able to find their way by landmark soon enough.

They’re staying near the Fontanka River embankment, in a tourist-friendly area popular with students, both of them dressed to fit in, more or less. It’s easy enough to find a rental lot where they can ditch the wheels, but from there they move off the main thoroughfare and take to the parks and alleys on foot.

“Alright,” L finally says, once they seem reasonably alone, the only sound the asphalt under their feet and some kids shouting in the distance. “I take it you weren’t expecting the alarms, either?”

* * *

 

The woman in the library gives Mello a cup of tea, and he drinks before it’s cool, letting the liquid curl the taste buds on the back of his tongue. The faster he drinks it, the heavier it sits in his stomach. Outside, it’s overcast. His feet clunk against the steps of the library, worn down soles of his shoes scraping against concrete.

St. Petersburg is shit. Moscow was _real_ fuckin’ shit, and Chechnya was a blast straight into fucking hell. Mello bites his tongue at the thought. Yeah, it was a fuckin’ _blast_ alright.

Too young to remember the details, more than old enough to remember the taste of death in the back of his throat.

By all means, he should have been in an orphanage. But something about getting decked in the face by another child when he woke up screaming doesn’t sit quite right, so he sticks to the streets. Safer that way, ironically. Hell, safer than getting himself adopted. Been there, done that.

This, he knows, is where most children end up. He’s just cut out the middle man a few years early.

Mello trudges down a familiar alleyway, dragging his fingers over graffiti stained walls and stepping over cracks in the street. It’s late into the morning. He’s starving.

Under his shirt, his rosary presses to his chest against the weight of his hand. He clutches it, prays, just in case.  

His eyes flick to two men, dressed simply enough, making their way down a parallel street. They walk quietly, wandering without a destination. Foreigners. They aren’t speaking Russian, that much he can tell. English, probably. Not close enough to conclude. Neither of them notice him.

_One of them’ll have something._

Maybe. The one with bruised circles under his eyes and the freaky irises is his best bet. He’s seen that kind of face before—nothing out of the ordinary here. If not money, then something of use. Yeah. He’ll have something on him. Foreigners always do.

Mello’s hand slips from his rosary to his pocket, and he follows.

* * *

 

“Yeah, well, when she told me about the place she made it sound like it was barely connected to her work at all. I mean, it makes sense to wanna feel safe when you’re not on the job,” B rationalizes, adds it to the mental notes of things he wasn’t quite aware of about A, “But Christ, I counted ten sensors in the kitchen alone. It’s going to take a bit more finesse to get into there.”

He keeps in step with Lawliet, taking notice of the way their movements sync up, the energy between them thrumming with the unsaid. He can still feel the way Lawliet’s heartbeat synced up with his, hard against his ribcage. It’s a good rhythm. _Going to keep it that way._

“So confession, she didn’t exactly tell me about the place. I got a call from her once from there, tracked it because I was bored and it wasn’t like her not to hide the caller ID. She seemed…quiet here in any case,” B runs his fingers through his hair, keeping his steps ever closer,  “We can try and track down the name it’s under, Elliot Holmes. Hah. Sounds like something out of old-school detective shit.”

They turn into a tunnel where a small convenience store glows behind a set of iron bars, hawking postcards to the summer tourists. His hair stands on end for a moment as Lawliet’s arm brushes his– _ghost of a memory, perhaps?_ It’s a feeling like being watched, somewhere between being under the lens of Lawliet’s wandering eye. He chalks it up to residual adrenaline from the chase, and perhaps the tempting way Lawliet’s lips curl against the harsh fluorescent light, his footsteps slow in the darkness.

 _These things start physical, with us, don’t they?_ His heartbeat jumps up several notches. B knows desire, knows touch to be just as much of his skill set as his ability to read between the lines of Lawliet’s words. And it would be criminal not to make use of it, especially when Lawliet is this knife-edge close to being caught in the dance that they’re meant to share.  A car sounds overhead, and he pulls them into a dark corner.

“Shh–” he pins Lawliet into the dark brick of the wall. Lawliet gives him a questioning look, and he gives him a wicked grin back, “I don’t think anyone is coming.” he whispers right into the shell of Lawliet’s ear.

* * *

 

B is too amped up to be gentle, and L hits his elbow on the wall with a stinging pain – both that and the hungry look on B’s face give rise to a faint gasp at the back of his throat.

Well then. Lawliet wasn’t expecting this. Not here and not so quickly upon arriving in St. Petersburg, at least. In fact, when he met up with B at LAX he’d half-expected to be sent away. Back in Vegas, B had been pretty intent on saying goodbye, and L intended to respect that. Intended. But the mystery surrounding A’s suicide wouldn’t let go of him.

And now, with B pinning L to the wall with his whole body, L realizes there are other things that won’t let go of him either. Not yet.

_“I don’t think anyone is coming.”_

The words tickle L’s ear, send a shiver straight into his stomach. He takes hold of B’s jacket and pulls away enough to look into his eyes, gauging them as deadly serious.

“ _You_ are,” L says, and the words have barely tumbled from his mouth before B’s unzipped his hoodie and peeled it off him, his fingers clawing up and under the tee-shirt beneath like he intends to slip L’s skin off next. L matches him move for move, pushing B’s jacket from his shoulders and dropping it onto the dirty ground below, fingers curling into the back of B’s longish hair and pulling his head back far enough to expose his white throat. L latches his mouth an inch or so below B’s ear and runs his tongue in a path down to the spot where B’s neck meets his shoulder, all sinew and soft skin and the scent of something wild and five years ago that L thought he had forgotten.  

_But I didn’t._

He breathes in the scent again as the moment registers with him.

And then B’s got him shoved away and back against the wall, his hands fumbling with the fly of L’s jeans, his expression set with a focused intensity – like he thinks L will dissolve away if he doesn’t get his hands on him right now, and in just the right way.

“It’s okay,” L says hoarsely, his fingers wrapping around B’s belt, unfastening the buckle. “Like you said, no one’s coming.”

* * *

 

B almost softens a moment at the rawness in Lawliet’s tone, wants to meet his lips and swallow him whole to contain his entire _being_ – but later, perhaps, when the urgency isn’t shaking in his fingertips to generate that _need_ reverberating off of him. He doesn’t think it’s imagination that it’s mirrored back at him, at the soft breath at his neck and the fingers at his belt.

B sucks at his nipple, _tastes as sweet as your skin always has_ , which falters Lawliet’s insistent hands with a gasp, but only for a moment. B echoes it as Lawliet gets his hand inside, cool with the outside air, fire with a tight grip. But manages to get a grip on Lawliet’s wrist before he gets too deep, just as his right hand hovers over the soft hair at the base of Lawliet’s rock-hard cock.

 _But I got here first?_ Lawliet’s competitive side is written in his wide eyes, and B shakes his head, “You first.” he manages with breathless lips. It’s not quite like him, but Lawliet loosens his grip and lets B take the lead, mouthing at the bone of his shoulder blade and suckling at his ear.

B relaxes his pace, his spine, just a little.

He brings Lawliet’s fingers up to his lips, sucking at them while he works Lawliet’s cock with his other hand. He presses himself closer along the cool brick, Lawliet’s dirt-and-sugar scent overwhelming him like smoke. He keeps his eyes wide open, cataloguing every swipe, every motion that sparks Lawliet’s eyes to blackened coals in the dim lighting.

B doesn’t seduce, he lights _fires_ . And this one, _this one_ will be the one to take him up in flames, he knows. But as Lawliet’s hands shake over his spine and ass, B knows he’s ready for it. _Ready for the burn scars and all that comes after it._

 _“Give it to me_ ,” he begs a moment after his hand rocks Lawliet over the edge.

* * *

 

It’s the sort of thing he’d expect from a man and a woman. Mello stops at the crossing of the street and the alleyway, back pressed to brick while he listens. Clothing unzips, falls to the ground. He should be used to it. He’s seen this sort of shit before, but it still makes his face burn when he realizes exactly _what_ is going on. But, he tells himself, at least they’re distracted.

Easy enough.

He peers around the corner, his heart in his throat. The familiar prickle of adrenaline pulsing at the back of his tongue and through to his fingers. There’s a hoodie on the ground, and he figures, or maybe hopes, that it’ll be good enough. He laughs to himself silently, breathing in sharply through his nose.

Mello cares more about dinner than seeing someone get a fucking hand job in a grimy St. Petersburg alleyway. And they’re not even _looking around_. It’s easy, he tells himself. His feet are silent against the pavement. His best bet is to just blow by, grab something, and go.

So he does just that. Deathly silent, his breaths caught in his chest, Mello brushes by the hoodie, dipping down into the opening of a pocket, grabs, and turns back the way he came. Not even looking. Or, at least, he hopes. His fingers are wrapped around a bundle of foil, and a few packets of jam. Not ideal, but better than nothing.

A few streets over, he unfolds the foil, a few tabs of God knows what peering up at him. He can figure that out later. All Mello knows is that it looks like enough to send someone on a trip and a half, so he knows, at least, it’ll cover a few meals. He’ll sell it tomorrow.

Squatting close to the pavement, Mello rips open one of the packets of jam, spreading some across his finger before jamming it into his mouth.

Gross.

He wrinkles his nose, wiping his hand on his pants to try and get it off. Nasty. The taste lingers on his tongue, and he spits on the pavement to try and get it _out_.

Mello tosses the rest of the jam onto the sidewalk, and starts wandering back in the direction of the library.

* * *

 

It isn’t often that L loses focus on his surroundings, but having B’s hand down his pants for the first time in _years_ – yeah, that will do it.

Everything shrinks down into a pinprick, the cool squalor of the alley wall contrasting against the heat of B’s palm and fingers, the sound of their muted panting, the tight coil of imminent orgasm clenching in L’s lower abdomen. L makes a strangled sound into B’s shoulder when he comes, spilling himself into B’s hand, which is still squeezing him as if reluctant to let go.

God, they could do this to each other all day, if they weren’t careful. Endless variations and orchestrations and titillations. Sex outdoors in an alley? Not even their first time, not at all.

 _“Give it to me,”_ B whispers, and L lets out a low chuckle at that, still catching his breath.

“Don’t start begging yet,” he says. “Save some for later.” But he’s already parted the fly of B’s jeans and tugged him out of his boxers, fingers skating down the length of his shaft and wrapping around the base while crushing his mouth against B’s, kissing hard as he strokes B’s cock in a rough, steady rhythm. L’s learned some more tricks since they were last together, but this is one of their oldest tunes, and playing it never gets boring.

B lasts about as long as L did – which is to say, _not long at all_. He moans into L’s open mouth when he finishes, a sound so startling and raw that L’s own cock twitches at it, still half-hard.

“Fuck,” B hisses when he finally pulls back a little, one hand splayed against the brick.

“Yeah,” is L’s eloquent reply, one sticky hand still curled around B’s neck. He blinks and attempts to re-orient himself. “Maybe we should go back to the hotel.”

They’ve started up again; they’ll be no stopping them now.

* * *

 

B takes a moment to catch his breath, oxygen seeming considerably less attractive than Lawliet’s talented mouth. His entire body feels warm and burnt inside out, but like a moth drawn to Lawliet’s candle flame, he staggers in to Lawliet’s shoulder, hungry for the touch, “Yeah,” He kisses Lawliet slowly, trying to capture that same intensity Lawliet had gifted him a moment ago. _You never were much for these aftermath moments_

 _But maybe that’s changed_. B catches Lawliet’s dark eyes as he pulls away, but it’s hard to read him in the darkness.

B zips himself up with one hand, licks Lawliet’s come off the fingers of the other, under the watch of Lawliet’s wide and hungry eyes. B sticks his tongue out and laughs, “You taste sweet.”

Lawliet gingerly touches his fingers to his lips, “You don’t.” but he licks them clean nonetheless, B crawling his eyes over his thin, slightly muscled frame. B smiles till his cheeks hurt as they dress, throwing his jacket over his arm, throws the other arm over Lawliet’s shoulder.

He doesn’t shrug it off for a few blocks, so B takes that as a victory.

The streets of St Petersburg seem brighter, though clouds are hanging over them and it starts pissing rain just as they arrive at the hotel. B takes it as a good sign. B is just starting to fumble for the hotel key, clumsy with eagerness when Lawliet stops suddenly behind him.

“Something up?” B glances back at Lawliet as he twists open the tarnished doorknob.

* * *

 

L frowns and pats his pockets again. Everything he had in his hoodie is gone – not that there was much there to begin with. A few packets of jam, six tablets of Dexy wrapped in foil. And yes, B had stripped him of the hoodie quickly and carelessly, so to have one thing or another fall out of his pockets isn’t too surprising. But everything?

He pushes his mind back to the alleyway, revisiting the scene. There’s something he missed, a flutter of movement just behind B that was there and gone again in a blink. L noticed even in the straining heat of that moment, he was just too preoccupied at the time to care.

B’s looking at him with the faintest of concern, paused at the hotel door like a statue, so he relaxes his frown and let’s out a breath.

“We may have had company in that alley,” L explains. “Everything in my sweatshirt pockets is gone.”

* * *

 

B stares at Lawliet’s wide-eyes confusion for a beat, then throws back his head and laughs, “Sorry, sorry,” it’s just… _you_ , getting pickpocketed in St. Petersburg, because we’re fucking in an alleyway?”

B checks his own jacket pockets, which are much deeper and more varied. Cigarettes, knife, cards, miscellenea, it all checks out, “Looks like they got you and not me, what were you carrying?”

Lawliet looks for a moment like he wants to head back on the streets and make a mystery of a _pickpocket_ of all things (it’s the principle of the thing), but B tugs him by the arm inside, “Come up, at least let’s get cleaned up first. Whoever they were, probably long gone by now.”

Lawliet still stews over it in the shower, eyes heavy and lidded as B scrubs shampoo into his hair, skating fingers over his ribcage in the casual way that he _can_ now. B doesn’t know nearly as much about crime in St. Petersburg as L would like. But catching pickpockets is a little beneath both of them.

_Shower Thoughts_ [Do not edit or repost]

 

Lawliet flops down on the thin duvet cover as B draws the flimsy blinds shut over the rainy evening. Neither of them have bothered to get dressed, and B stops to admire the soft curves and bony edges of Lawliet’s pale skin before cocooning himself next to Lawliet’s body shamelessly close.

He hesitates a moment before speaking, Lawliet’s skin a map of all the space and time between them. There’s new muscle over old bone, old scars and new alike. _Everything’s a detective story with you._

“Where do you think we should start tomorrow?” B whispers in Lawliet’s ear, drawing a hand down to a small, unfamiliar scar in the small of Lawliet’s back. He hovers his hand there, like a question mark, “I only know a little about the last case she was working on here, and all the leads are barely-there at best.”

* * *

 

Lawliet feels the ghost of B’s fingers barely touching his back, and rolls over onto his side so that they’re facing each other, nothing but a rumpled sheet between them. B’s hair is still damp, drying into the loose, dark curls that make him look far more angelic than he has a right to. His eyes are searching, searching, searching, but this time it feels far from oppressive, and L reaches out to push B’s hair out of his face, really only mussing it in the process.

“Try to break back into that apartment? Deactivate the sensors somehow.” he suggests. “You said she told you it’s where she went for quiet?”

He grimaces a little internally, wondering how anyone could stand for life to go quiet, of all things. Then again, this might be a type of quiet, lounging in bed with B while the sound of the night’s traffic, voices, and music come faintly through the window.

“Based on that, I can’t help but think she confided in you more than she did me. What sort of personal things did you discuss?” _When you weren’t talking about me_ , he thinks, and pushes the thought away. Things are nice right now.

“And while I’m interrogating,” he says, smiling a little. “How’d you get this?” He reaches around to touch his fingers to the back of B’s thigh, where he noticed a puckery scar while they were in the shower. “Looks like a gunshot.”

* * *

 

 _You can interrogate me all day, sweetheart_ , B leans into Lawliet’s touch, but his smile falters a little when he realizes the scar Lawliet has chosen. “Yeah. It was.”

He inclines his forehead so that it’s touching Lawliet’s shoulder. It’s warm. He doesn’t speak for a moment, the memory caught in his throat. But Lawliet is patient, patient like B never is as he gathers his thoughts about the three-and-a-half year old wound, “You wouldn’t have heard of Bleak Birdie, would you?”

Lawliet shakes his head, his wet hair tracing lines on B’s collarbones. B takes a breath, keeps going, “Yeah, s’good really. So I did more than a few inside jobs as a hitman. It helps you get an in with the right people, so long as you’re good enough to be selective about targets. A gave me the idea, though I think she may have been joking. Hard to tell with her, sometimes. But it helped get a lot of operations off the ground, instant trust, instant respect.”

B can tell from the narrowing of Lawliet’s eyes that he doesn’t quite know what to make of that _particular_ strategy, but his hand is still gentle against the scar, so B goes on, “Would have been a later hit, few years before the Dallas case. The guy, he was a big, tough one. Hit man turned business-man. Brutal and one of the best. And his death date wasn’t anywhere close,” B hesitates, trying to wrap all the memories of the _hell_ he felt then in the peace he feels now. It’s not easy. But it’s getting easier, “I still went after him, though. And he got me. Just like I thought he might. Wouldn’t have made it out if it hadn’t been for my partner, and I almost told him to take the night off.”

 _I still don’t know what stopped me_ , B thinks as Lawliet’s fingertips run over the puckers of the gunshot with somewhere between revulsion and reverence, _but I guess it was all worth it, wasn’t it?_

“A gave me hell for it, which I guess I appreciated later. She was…tough at all the right times, you know? She knew I was being reckless, and knew…why.”  But she gave no quarter, right? Like always,” he forces his eyes into Lawliet’s, which are surprisingly gentle, even if storms brew behind them, “Yeah, that was A. Mainly she was good at getting me to talk, which, well– shit, I mean, it was mostly work, or you, I guess. Near the end she’d talk a lot about memories, legacy was the word she’d use. She’d talk about it a lot when we smoked together, which is when she’d talk, if at all.”

He stops before the he goes any further, mainly thinking about the _many_ conversations he and A had on the topic of Lawliet. His hand grazes the scar on Lawliet’s back again, and he shifts out of Lawliet’s view, presses a kiss there, “How about yours then? I showed you mine.”

* * *

 

“Ah, that.” A flash of remembered pain flinches behind his eyes. “Shrapnel, if you can believe it.” He points a spot just below his ribs. “This one, too.”

B’s eyes widen a bit and L can’t really blame him. He doesn’t risk his life in the field very often at all; not like B does. “I was wondering if you knew, actually. About what happened to cause this.” He strokes the scar below his ribs again. “But maybe she never told you.”

He takes in a deep breath and turns the clock back to almost two years ago. “It was late ‘96. ‘Deneuve’s’ movements became unusual – enough for me to notice. I looked into it and discovered that A was working with a new group of guns-for-hire, which more or less explained what she was up to as Deneuve. I would have left it there, but then M16 contacted me.” He pauses, expecting B to interject with questions, but he only nods and gives L a nudge to continue.

“M16 was concerned that the new group might be after Deneuve’s secrets, including my real identity, and they were serious enough about it that I decided to extract her myself.” He touches the scar again, absently. “We tracked the group down to a compound in Siberia and forced our way in using explosives. That’s how I got the shrapnel.”

L half rolls over into his back and stares up at the water-marked ceiling, the stains blooming into sepia-toned, deformed flowers. “I found A inside the compound surrounded by dead bodies, but she was calm and somehow unsurprised to see me. She’d infiltrated the group with the intent of taking them down from the inside, and had succeeded.”

 _Succeeded, and then some,_ L thinks. The compound had looked like a massacre, not the neat, lethal work of Deneuve. L suspected that her motives might have been personal, but when pressed, A gave him good reason to back off.

But L hesitates to tell B that detail. B would have pressed her harder, and might blame L for not pressing hard enough.

“She ever share any of that with you?” he asks, instead.

* * *

 

When Lawliet rolls away from him into a memory the draft in the room starts to prickle at B’s naked skin. The story Lawliet lays out is a barely a skeleton of the truth, but B certainly wasn’t expecting it to tumble out of the closet, its questions gravedigging into his psyche.

“She didn’t, no,” his voice sounds distant to him, like speaking through water, “We’d shoot the shit about cases quite a bit, always trading stories. She had a lot of them. But she had more than a few that she kept mum about. Made them seem like they were top-secret more than anything personal, but I didn’t push ‘em, either. She was so put together about it all. Well, especially compared to me, too.”

 _But you just didn’t see it in her, did you?_ B runs his fingers through his hair, suddenly feeling more alone than he has in years. There were times when A had felt like the only friend he had. There were also times when she felt like the only person who could sit with the caustic knot of loneliness between the both of them, just _be with,_ without fixing or fading, then wake up in the morning, swipe of Red Pony on her lips and do what needed to be done _._ _I wasn’t sure if she felt it then, but now? I guess I’m sure._

He slides off of bed and fumbles in his jacket, lighting a cigarette. When he glances in the dusty mirror of the vanity, he nearly drops the lighter, as a red-haired girl smiles with crimson eyes flashes into his vision. She’s gone as soon as he blinks.

 _I should have known better. Should have asked the questions like she would._ He turns back to Lawliet, ready to take what he deserves from the story. _And isn’t that what I wanted?_

“So M16 got involved because of her? They don’t usually let these things slide,” B’s hands want to reach for the scar on Lawliet’s ribcage but something in his chest holds them back. The image of A flickers in his peripheral vision again, this time with warped cheekbones and a grin sewn shut. He resists the urge to scream at it to _get lost,_  “ Must have been pretty serious to get you out in the field.”

* * *

 

“M16 wanted to arrest her, actually,” L admits, remembering all the various things he had to hold over the organization’s head in order to convince them that he was the best person to clean up. “I told her to head to Columbia until the air cleared. As far as I could tell she thought it was a good idea.”

B looks jumpy, cigarette ash shaking from his fingers and onto the sheets, and L almost regrets telling him anything at all. In all these years, B thought of A as a close if slightly guarded confidante, and she was the type to mirror back his projections unfailingly. Her technique was masterful, and only failed on L insomuch as he rarely projected onto others, preferring to take his measure of them over time (as much time as necessary, really) until they eventually showed their true selves.

He does not think that A ever showed him her true self. But then again, he’s not sure it was something she was capable of.

“Lay back down,” L commands softly, tugging on B’s arm until he settles back into the pillows, cigarette clenched between his lips. “Listen…” He secures his arm across B’s chest and curls his fingers around his shoulder. “I have a lot of fond memories of A. Of you and me and A, especially. So I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but she was…” he bites on his lip and hunts for the right word, “not quite right.”

* * *

 

B takes a shuddering breath, lets Lawliet’s familiar mud-and-sugar-cube smell and firm words ground him, like they would have so many years ago.

“Well, you know she’s not the only one, right?” He laughs, but it sounds forced even to his own ears. The smoke whispers into the draft in the room, Lawliet’s warmth chasing away the hallucinations, perhaps, but not the memories.

 _It’s enough that he’s here though. He’s here and he knows_. Being with. It’s what A was good at too.

Lawliet’s eyes roam over his face, half-concerned at his silent fugue, “Hey, you too. I mean, I’m not right, for sure, but don’t give yourself too much credit.” B runs his fingers through Lawliet’s soft, black hair. It’s almost dry now, “Could have been any of us, really.”

The off-hand thought catches him by the throat a moment after it slips out of his mouth, and he clutches Lawliet’s hand at his shoulder very tightly, pulling his body close so that their faces are nearly touching.

“I’m…” the words die in B’s throat again, Lawliet’s eyes swallowing them whole, “You’re still here.” He lets a clumsy kiss at Lawliet’s jaw finish his thought, fingers crawling down to caress at the scar left by A on Lawliet’s sinuous ribcage.

* * *

 

L sees B’s point and both agrees with it and doesn’t. Maybe none of them are quite right, but how could they be, doing the work that they do? But there’s something bordering on desperate in B’s voice, clamoring to be soothed, and from the way B’s hands are traveling over his body, verifying his presence, L has an idea of what to do.

He scrapes his fingers through B’s hair and gently pulls his head back, sucking at the hollow of his throat and tonguing at the mark he leaves, his other hand reaching down to cup B’s ass.

“I’m here,” he murmurs in assent, moving his face lower and taking B’s nipple in his mouth and teething it lightly. In other circumstances he’d be less careful, but something tells him this moment is all about being careful. Balancing this new, uncertain present against a past that’s both breathtakingly innocent and unspeakably ugly.

L feathers his fingers through the hair below B’s navel, taking his half-hard cock in hand, caressing his thumb against the tip.

“I want to come back to you, B,” L says, the words mumbled not just because his mouth is all over B’s skin, but because he’s really not good at this – at confessing – but it’s a whole lot easier when there’s sex involved. _This_ kind of sex, where each movement is planned by L, orchestrated by L. He can even let go of all that, if he wants to, so long as it’s with B.

“Let me?”

* * *

 

B takes a steady breath and lets Lawliet’s fingertips start to fuse together the fractures under his skin with gentle heat. Every touch is an acknowledgment, of some shared history, shared grief, of the life that still _beats_ at them with heart and violence alike.

 _“I want to come back to you, B.”_ the words are so close to his skin Lawliet might well be branding them, teeth and tongue burning them indelibly, _“Let me?”_

“Yes, _god yes_ ,” _always always always._ B rakes his fingertips over the wings of Lawliet’s shoulder blades, letting the sensation of heated breath at his cock, nails at his ass take the thoughts from his mind, the breath from his lungs.

_You’re here you’re with me you’re coming back, you’re not going to leave. You’re here._

When Lawliet’s tongue rolls over the length of his shaft, B’s gasp nearly turns into a cry. Lawliet’s tongue is teasing and insistent at once, licking at him like hungry flames. B flickers his eyes open to take in the vision of Lawliet’s devil’s smile between swollen lips, one hand ghosting over the base of B’s cock, the other pumping himself in earnest.

“Ahhh–fuck!” B _does_ cry out when Lawliet engulfs his cock, dragging his teeth slowly as he pulls off to tongue at the slit.  Lawliet was always good at blowjobs, but sometime in their years apart he’s become fucking _tantalizing,_ all lips and breath and obscenely talented tongue.

 _Fuck if you can get me so fast a second time._ B barely manages to form a coherent thought, and grabs the arm that’s crawling towards his nipple, conflicted for only a fraction of a moment as he brings Lawliet’s lips to his for a messy, desperate kiss. He catches Lawliet’s eyes for a fraction of a second, the black of them so unfathomable B _feels_ them swallowing him up in mind, body, _everything._

“Condoms in my jacket.”

* * *

 

L lays his full weight on B’s stretching out body, tongue swirling into his mouth, teeth tugging at his lips, his own erection just beginning to drip against B’s thigh.

“Alright,” he whispers when B directs him to the condoms, hopping off the bed long enough not to just fetch those but a bottle of lube, too, purchased from a sex shop before he left Las Vegas. He takes two condoms, just in case, then hesitates for just a moment, staring at the foil packets between his fingers. A handful of seconds and he’s made his decision, returning the bed to straddle B’s hips and loom over him, aware of B’s jutting cock just barely nudging at his own backside.

B’s chest is rising and falling with quick breaths, his lips becomingly flush and swollen-looking. L kisses them again before opening the lube and squeezing a generous amount of the stuff onto B’s right hand, then pivoting forward so that he can guide B’s fingers. “Get me ready,” he says, registering the look of surprise on B’s face just before he feels him knuckle his way inside, stretching him out, twisting, while L rocks slightly, getting used to the sensations that start out as invasive and turn into something much, much too good.

A hazy span of time passes during which L almost completely loses himself in kissing B and fucking himself on B’s fingers, relishing not just the physical sensations but the utter _relief_ of being able to switch his brain off for once. B’s the only one he’s been able to do that with. The only one who felt safe.

“Fuck,” B whimpers, his voice strained to near breaking. “Lawliet…”

“I know. I’m gonna do this on your cock now,” L whispers against B’s neck, then licks it.

The condom, then, followed by more lube, and L slowly lowers himself onto B’s length, his fingers digging into the tender flesh just below B’s ribs. A wave of dizziness sweeps through him, heightening both the pain and pleasure of the moment, and he gasps a little as he settles down into his full weight, eyes squeezed shut. He feels B’s hands wrap around his forearms, fingers stroking like a question.

It’s enough for L to open his eyes again, smiling just a little as he starts to rock his hips.

* * *

 

Lawliet controls every fraction of movement, every twitch of his hips is a focused precision movement, but there’s no thought in it, all _raw_ instinct, skin and bone and _inferno_ all over every inch of B. He keeps still as Lawliet works up a rhythm, heat building in the pool of his stomach. Lawliet’s cock is hard and livid at the base of him, and B crawls a hand down his thigh only to be pinned there, caught by Lawliet’s arresting stare.

 _It’s your call_ . _God knows I won’t last long like this_. Lawliet doesn’t let go of his wrist, ups the pace to frantic. B can almost feel the moment his tip brushes the prostate, can see the way it takes the breath out of Lawliet’s lungs. It’s the sharp dig of Lawliet’s hipbone that does it.

He comes with what’s barely a scream, arching upwards into the last stutter of Lawliet’s hips. When his breath comes back to him, Lawliet is still writhing. He loosens his grip and moves B’s hand to his cock.  B finishes him in only two strokes, Lawliet cracking apart under his fingertips and collapsing onto his chest with a ragged gasp.

Their breathing syncs up for several long moments, B tracing patterns onto the ridge of Lawliet’s spine. The moment doesn’t last nearly long enough, but B closes his eyes to commit it to memory. It’s enough, when Lawliet eases off of him with a slight grimace, B dropping an absent kiss to his fingertip.

“Will you regret that tomorrow?” B can’t resist the quip, lazy and hazy and smiling.

Lawliet just smiles wryly, touches a finger to B’s chest experimentally, tasting the semen drying on his chest, “It is sweet.” He says it so seriously that B just laughs, laughs and pulls Lawliet close, yanking the covers overtop of them. Lawliet has a shit-eating grin for a moment, then settles back and cleans the both of them off with a tissue. He looks for a moment conflicted, about to get up and gaze at the mysteries of the city, but B gives his arm a light tug, and he tumbles back overtop of the bedsheets.

“Come on, Lawliet, you must be as wrung out as I am.” B smiles blearily at him, the post-orgasm fading to a gentle sleepiness. Lawliet seems to agree, or at least doesn’t protest when B’s head pillows itself onto his shoulder.

“Is that what you came back for, then?” B asks before the thought leaves him. _You wanted to come back to me. Did you mean that?_

“Mm.” Lawliet’s rare incoherence is so endearing the B doesn’t bother to press for an answer, just wraps Lawliet’s arm around his chest and pulls the light-chain to plunge them into the softness of the night.


	3. June 3 1998

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an accompanying meta for this chapter's description of a one-time pad code. To learn more, it is linked below :) 
> 
> http://sybilius.tumblr.com/post/148696769061/black-beats-meta-wammys-kids-code

**June 3, 1998**

 

They start the day off with a big breakfast at a cafe popular with tourists and locals alike, though it’s late enough in the morning that they’re able to get a quiet table near the front windows. B orders eggs and kolbasa, while L attacks a plate of _syrniki_ with red currant sauce and sour cream. Both of them drink spiced tea from delicate but chipped china cups, and under the table, B keeps hooking his ankle around L’s. It’s a comforting sort of pressure. For now.

 

_Streets of St Petersburg_ [do not edit or repost]

It’s not lost on L that this could end up being a mistake, but the deed is done and there’s no taking it back now. And it had been nice, sleeping with B in that too-small bed, their legs tangled together, B waking up first and lighting a cigarette, smoking while he fiddled with L’s hair. If it could _stay_ nice, that would be perfect.

But ‘nice’ doesn’t feel right, after too long. They’re seasoned self-saboteurs, the both of them.

For now, though, there is warm breakfast and golden sunlight streaming in through the windows, cheering up the cafe’s faded red-checked curtains.

“A’s apartment building…” L says from around a mouthful of food, then swallows. “For long term use the sensors are probably electronic, not battery operated. We could try cutting the power.”

* * *

 

B keeps a wry smile on his face, tapping the ash off the cigarette and revelling in the warmth of Lawliet’s foot against his. The smile flickers slightly at the mention of A’s name. _She's dead and gone._ He raises his eyes to the numbers above Lawliet’s head. _But Lawliet, he's safe, for now_ . _We’re the only ones left._

 _Let’s keep it us against the world._ The thought gives him crystal certainty amidst the ever-shifting images of A in his mind.

“Cutting the power could work. You got any plastic bags? I have an idea of how we can cover our tracks.” They’re in new disguises, looking a lot more like local street artists than tourists, hair tucked into caps and unseasonably thick dirty jackets. _Best to keep the police off our tail._

There’s a gust of warm air on the morning breeze that crawls at B’s exposed neck. That feeling of being watched creeps up on him again as he scours the alleyway, looking for tiny corpses. Within minutes he’s found four, but it’s only the fifth that has sufficiently few maggots.

B picks up the fist-sized dead rat by the tail and grins at Lawliet before depositing it into the takeaway bag from the cafe. “We can jam this in the transformer, think I saw it up next to the fire escape in back.”

A moment later, B notices a wiry, skinny boy with golden hair stuck to his thin jacket, watching them from the street corner. The hunger in his eyes strikes a chord with B from a history that he’s sure is half-hallucinated. A moment later B notices the symbol scratched in behind the dumpster. _Addict or someone looking to sell?_ _Tough to tell from a distance._ He nudges Lawliet and glances back at the boy.

* * *

Mello’s lips are chapped. Water sloshes around in his stomach while he walks, and he’s hungry. He runs his fingers through his hair, and thinks about how he’s going to get himself a shower. In the bathroom of a run down diner, he splashes water on his face and rubs his skin dry with scratchy paper towels.

He scrapes his feet to get some sort of background noise while he moves, and his head feels light. He’s not dying. No, not quite there yet, but he’s uncomfortable, a little nauseous, and too damned tired to do this.  

He kicks a rock, and it clunks against a passing dumpster. The tabs sitting in that same foil in the bottom of his pocket scrape against the lining of his pants, and they crunch under his fingers when he stuffs his hand in his pockets.

Mello just needs to sell this shit and get himself to the grocery store. Two men cross the street perpendicular to the one he’s on, and he follows. Nothing better to do, and maybe it’ll work itself out.

They notice him, so going for a wallet is out of the question. One of the men nods towards him, and Mello has half a mind to duck back into the alleyway. No, they’re just interested. Curious, maybe. Crossing his fingers that they wouldn’t be cops, he approaches.

From the corners of his eyes, he can spot three different means of escape, if absolutely necessary.

His feet scrape the ground, and his hands fumble in his pockets, fingers wrapped around the foil and around an old receipt with illegible scribbles of writing on the back. Mello frowns, tracing his eyes over the two men. One of them has those same eyes.

Good, at least this means he can get somewhere.

It’s all he really needs to look for. He doesn’t make eye contact at first, and he prays, silent, that this’ll work. He drops his shoulders, and it’s shameless, sure, but at least he’ll be able to eat. Downtrodden, he lets his gaze flick up to the one with bruised bags under his eyes, and pulls the tin foil from his pocket.

“It’s dexy,” is all he says, unfolding the foil and flashing a few. “Two thousand rubles,” he adds. He knows it’s cheap, because market price doesn’t really mean anything to him. It’s enough to get him through a few meals, and that’s all that matters. He’d sell diamonds dirt cheap if it meant he’d be able to sustain himself.

He’s hoping he’s got the right kind of guys. Mello swallows, the saliva thick in his throat, and folds the foil back shut, still holding it out towards the two men with a trembling hand.

* * *

 

The kid looks like he might have bright gold hair when he’s actually clean, but he’s not and there’s a yawning hunger in his eyes that gives L pause for a reason he can’t quite name. Call it instinct. B, too, is certainly giving him the eyeball of curiosity, though maybe that’s only because he’s realized that the dexy the boy’s peddling is actually from L’s own stash.

L doesn’t particularly like street kids.

He tilts away from the boy slightly, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the fingers of the other curling between his lip, careful not to give him the full weight of his stare.

“What do you think, Rue?” he directs to B. “Two thousand rubles?”

Because in truth, it’s B who has the better instincts in situations like these. He knows how to lure people in – or scare them off. And from the cock of B’s eyebrows, L determines that the chance of it being either one of those is about even.

* * *

 _Smart, quick, opportunistic. But hungry._ B softens when he realises how much the kid reminds him of himself, stumbling off a freight vessel onto the streets of London before he had tumbled into Lawliet’s orbit. _He’s in with the wrong crowd though, and really isn’t tough enough for it. Give it time._

_Might starve before he gets there, though._

“Let me see,” B reaches for the foil just as the boy snatches it back, _alright, he’s getting there._ B quirks a smile at him, fumbling for familiar Russian words. He doesn’t bother to put on a native accent, “Smarter than you look, huh. Let me tell you something. Two thousand is about half of what you should be asking. We’ll give you four thousand for it.”

The boy’s dark eyes widen, like he’s going to ask _what’s the catch?_ but Lawliet is already counting out the bills carelessly and holding them out like evidence. The boy snatches them without thinking, legs tensed to run, but his eyes are crawling over Lawliet’s face with a strange sense of _deja vu_.

B is surprised the boy doesn’t run, but he’s sizing them up now, half-wonderment, half-suspicion.

“You recognise him, don’t you?” B grins ear-to-ear, but manages to make it charming as opposed to threatening, “You were pretty quiet yesterday. Takes a lot to catch us unawares, even when we’re distracted, so that’s impressive.”

B keeps him there with a slow eye contact. He can tell the boy thinks he _should_ run, and that’s probably right, but he knows they’re not cops. _Must be curiosity then. That’s a good sign, too._ B leans back slightly, letting the boy know he takes him seriously.

 _“_ If you want other work, I think we’ve got a job we could pay you for. It ain’t legal, but it ain’t that hard either, and it’d buy us some time. Might buy you a ticket out of this town. What do you think?”

* * *

 

 _Fuck_.

Mello’s still holding the rubles out like an idiot, the bills clenched tight between his fingers. He should have known. He should have fucking _known_. It doesn’t click until he’s taking the money and he looks right up at the man handing it to him. He thinks to bolt right then and there, but the man doesn’t seem to care, and his friend’s looking at him like this whole thing’s a damned joke. The same guys he saw jerking each other off in that alleyway the day before.

“You’re… _oh,”_ is all Mello can manage to stammer out, eyes flicking from one figure to the other, their features suddenly familiar, despite the different clothing.

He should _run_.

His legs won’t move, partially because he’s terrified and partially because he doesn’t understand their motives. _Why?_ Is what he really wants to ask, because it doesn’t make sense. He stares the man with a thumb jammed between his lips down, because by now, they both know that he’s essentially selling him back his own drugs. They don’t berate him and if anything, they seem amused by the situation. Well, the one doing most of the talking is, at least.

But if they wanted him dead, they would’ve done it by now. No one would turn an eye, and that would be that. But they’re dressed different than yesterday, and it’s obvious that they’ve got their own vendetta to push.

 _It ain’t legal but it ain’t all that hard either_.

Okay, definitely not cops. But does that make it any safer? They’re smart. Real fucking smart, and he feels like an idiot for not realizing sooner. But he’d had the upper hand once, and if he needed to get away, he could do it again. Right? Sure, that’s what he told himself, anyway. He knew too many people by the Tochka to get dragged down _that_ route.

He likes the one talking to him. The one with the freaky eyes is a little too unsettling. Maybe, because it’s a look that’s a little too familiar. They’re _definitely_ foreign, he can tell by the way they fumble around with their words, and how unfamiliar their accent is to his ears.

It’s a risk, but St. Petersburg carries too many ghosts above his head, and he realizes that now, it’s just waiting until his clock runs out. The streets were starting to thin out, and sure, he was smart, but nature always seemed to have the upper hand. “Yeah,” he says, his voice shaking as he stuffs half of the bills in one pocket and half in the other. “I want food and a shower,” he pushes, averting his wide-eyed gaze to the ground while he talks.

If anything, he can get a meal or two and a bit of shelter from this.

* * *

 

With the boy along they have to walk to A’s apartment, which means no daredevil escape via motorbike, which in turns mean they’ll have to get this right. They kid is watchful and quiet, tense for any sort of betrayal, his thin lips curled in a slight frown.

 _Good,_ L thinks, because there are worse people he could run into, and probably has, in the past.

He relaxes slightly, though, when L stops at a street vendor to buy him warm pirozhki and a bottle of coca-cola, wolfing down the food without preamble. The taste of the sweet fizzy drink, in particular, makes the kid’s eyes widen in appreciation, enough so that L buys a bottle of coke for himself.

When the kid’s finished eating they walk the last of the few blocks to A’s building. Once there, they do a casual stroll round the back, taking cover under the poorly maintained fire escape. Being led to somewhere more isolated makes the kid freezes a little, poised to run, maybe, so L casts him a mild look.

“A friend used to live here,” he explains. “We want to see if she left anything in her apartment.”

L doesn’t mention the sensors and that’s just as well because a realization is already taking shape in his mind – one that should have occurred to him long before now, but the last time he and B had come here they followed up with back-alley handjobs instead of a proper debriefing.

A was hyper-vigilant, and any sensors in her apartment should have alerted _her_ to an intrusion, not the police. A didn’t need the police, ever.

 _Not good,_ he thinks, biting against the back of his thumb. _Got to stay sharper than this._

* * *

B eyes the rust-painted fire escape with a grin, his bag heavy with a few other supplies nabbed from the hardware store on the way back. And the rat, of course.

“Right then, here’s what’s going to happen,” B gestures at the ladder to the boy, “We’ll take you back for a shower after, but this might get kinda messy, so you’ll want to shower after, assuming this works. We need to cut the power to get in to this place, but we don’t want it to look like a break-in. So that’s where you come in. You can climb, yeah?”

The boy nods, steely-eyed. B likes his grit already, notes his far-off death date as someone who can stay useful to them, if this pans out, “Follow me.”  The two of them shimmy up the rungs all the way to the the grey insulated transformer.

“So this is the grounding cable here,” B holds his gloved fingers up to a mid-thickness, insulated wire that runs to a nearby power line, then takes the wire-cutters to it in gentle, randomized snips to the surface, until only the raw copper alloy remains. _If they don’t look too hard, should create the effect of bite marks._

“Right, put these on,” B shoves the gloves at him, noting his beat-up combat boots, “Those aren’t steel-toe, right? Good. Assuming this is rigged up right, when you cut it, power to this building, and any others nearby will go out. You give us 15 minutes after I take off, and then cut it.”

B removes the rat by the tail, knotting the bag and then corpse to the grounding line, so it looks like the animal was trapped and tried to gnaw its way out. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. He gets the wire cutters into position, passes them into the kid’s hands, which are shaking slightly. B softens a bit, “Relax. Trust me, you’ll definitely survive this. If the line arcs, get yourself to the brick. It’ll ground better. And don’t touch the transformer after you’ve cut ground. Get the cutters and get outta there. We’ll meet you at the horseman’s statue by St. Isaac’s Cathedral.”

The kid nods, and B thumbs out another four thousand roubles, “We’ll get you the rest when we meet afterwards. You got all that?”

* * *

Mello eagerly accepts the food from L’s hands, wolfing it down without a second thought. It was good stuff, too, and the Coca Cola was sweet against his tongue and the back of his teeth. Mello rolled his tongue inside of his mouth. He knows better than to talk, or to do anything that’ll fuck this up or put him in danger.

 _A friend_ , he thinks to himself, glancing around while the two men speak amongst themselves. This is a place he couldn’t afford in his wildest dreams. To a child, it appears that these people must come from money. _Or, there’s foul play involved._ Either or, doesn’t make much of a difference to him. There’s no reason to ask questions about things that don’t concern him.

_Can you climb?_

“Sure,” Mello says, glancing at the man and then the ladder. Hell, he can do anything if it’ll get him out of here. One foot hooks onto the ladder, and he hoists himself up behind his new employer—for lack of better words—and climbs.

It doesn’t seem that high, until he makes the mistake of looking down. Oh, _fuck_ . He adjusts his footing, and continues his way upwards, his heart in his throat and his hands trembling while he tries to hoist himself up. Forget about _them_ trying to kill him, if his foot slips, he’s done for. He can climb, but that doesn’t mean his heart’s willing to handle it.

Scared shitless might’ve been a simpler way to put it.

 _Gross_ , Mello notes, watching him fumble with the dead rat. He slips on the gloves handed to him, wriggling his fingers inside and rubbing at the insulation. But when the wire cutters are thrusted into his hands, his heart is in his throat. Yeah, he shouldn’t have just blindly said yes to this. But the man’s talking a mile a minute, spitting out instructions and explaining shit that’s just flying right over his head.

He gets the basic principle, but he’s not sure that’s really enough for him to do this right.

Doesn’t have much of a choice, does he?

He swallows, adrenaline thick on the back of his tongue, and he nods. “Yeah. I got it,” he says, but he’s not really sure if that’s true. Maybe this guy’s bullshitting him with the fast explanations and the assurance that he’s not going to fall to an untimely death, but he seems so fucking confident that it’ll work that Mello’s not about to back down.

Besides, he’s curious about what all this apartment bullshit is about. And the extra cash helps, too.

“Good luck,” he murmurs, and Mello watches him make his way down, focusing on the top of his head rather than the ground below. Oh, shit. He wrinkles his nose at the dead rat, feeling even grimier than before. Fifteen minutes, cut the cord. Easy. Easy. Yeah, if he wasn’t twenty feet off the fucking ground. He looked down again, and the Hail Mary coming off of his lips was trembling and hesitant.

Christ.

Fifteen minutes. He didn’t have a fucking watch.

He counts it out, trying not to forget his numbers halfway through, and when he hits nine hundred, Mello cuts the wire. A spark rips out of the box, and his breath catches in his throat, stifling the scream that nearly follows after. He stumbles, foot slipping off of the ladder, and fucking books it down. Not really sure if he did it right or not, but he can practically feel the electricity ripping through his limbs, and he’s not eager enough to wait around and see what happens.

Run.

His feet pound against the ground, and he knew that this, really, could get him in trouble with the cops. With no papers on file, that’d be a mess all on its own. The extra four thousand rubles sit heavy in his pocket, and halfway into his run he realizes that the Cathedral is in the exact opposite direction, and spins on his heel. His blood’s pumping with sheer terror and an ice cold rush. When he nearly slams into the fencing around the horseman statue, he can hardly breathe, his gasps coming out dry and shaking.

He could’ve left. Could’ve taken his eight thousand rubles and just fucking booked it. Would’ve lasted him a while, but again he’s curious and he decided, with the wire cutters in his hands and a rush coursing through his veins, that he was pretty alright with these guys. Maybe not the one with the freaky eyes, but his friend was good enough. Reminded him of past acquaintances and the rough street kids that seemed so much older and so much tougher than he’d ever be.

He leans against the fencing, catching his breath, and waits.

* * *

As soon as they hear the transformer spark out, B picks the lock on the back entrance and they’re making their way down a stuffy service hallway. L hopes the kid made a quick exit off-scene; he managed the job, but time will tell if he decides to go through and meet with them at the horse’s statue later. It would surprise L if he decided to take the rubles and run.

They manage to dodge an elderly resident coming down the stairs, probably hoping to discover what happened to the power, and get into A’s apartment without being seen. The sensors stay silent as they ease into the sparsely furnished sitting room, allowing L his first chance to really look at the place. B walks in a slow circle while L prefers to stand and tilt his head toward one side of the room, then the other, letting his eyes take in the details first. A single sofa in worn, plum-colored velvet, a leather armchair with a few cigarette burns on one side. Furniture that either came used or was, in fact, thoroughly used by A herself, though L finds the latter highly unlikely. A wasn’t the type to stay in one place for very long.

 

_Blueprint for A’s Apartment [do not edit or repost]_

She was the type to return to certain places, though, and Russia was always high on that list, possibly even the top of it. Ironic, considering that A’s mother fled Russia (then the U.S.S.R.) when A was five and never looked back. By the time L met her, A was thirteen and living at a children’s group home in Detroit, having been abandoned by her mother after the death of her car salesman stepfather.

From the moment he sat down across from her at the chessboard with the missing black queen (a GI Joe figure standing in her place), it took L only four moves to learn the secret that A kept most fiercely hidden.

He isn’t certain that she ever forgave him for that.

L glides his gaze to B, eyeing a sensor mounted in the corner of the room. He’s 95 percent certain that A never told B her secret, either, and L wonders if B is prepared to deal with the actual full truth of A, should they actually uncover it.

“What do you think?” he murmurs.

* * *

Some might call the apartment sparse. Once B gives the place a solid once-over, he realizes this might be the most of A he’s ever seen in one place, right from the cigarette burns down to the subtle cracks in the window. Plants there too, long since dead. Just like she’d said.  The copies of the last three birthday cards he had sent her are lined up in a row on the bookshelf, _Catch-22, Crime and Punishment, Slaughterhouse Five–_ he flips them open, fingering the 1996 letter scrawled overtop of the final page of _Catch-22. There’s those memories again. That was before it got worse, then got better again._ B bites his tongue, wonders if he should have mentioned _that_ to Lawliet when he’d asked last night.

_Birthday Card [do not edit or repost]_

 

_Didn’t really seem like the time._

There’s a slight ringing in his ears.

It rolls over him for a moment, how little time he’s spent _really_ thinking of her. Seemed like she’d given him so much of herself, but sometimes it felt a little too much like looking into a mirror for B to stay comfortable with for long.

 _I guess now I’ll know why._ B isn’t sure he wants to. But it isn’t in his nature to hold back.

“I think if we’re looking for what Ace didn’t want us to find, we might have to look a little harder,” at the end of the bookshelf is a copy of _Through the Looking Glass,_ part of a jade-colored matched set of gold-edged hardcovers. She hadn’t let B anywhere near them.

“Was A’s copy of _Alice_ with her when she– shot herself?”

L shakes his head grimly. The ringing in his ears takes shape as a steady drip-tock, as if a bathtub tap is leaking onto long, feminine legs he remembers too well. While she traded case notes at fourteen, while she shaved her legs for another role, age sixteen, while she teased B until he stuck his feet in the lukewarm water and she dragged him under. They were both sixteen, then.  

“Do you hear that?” it’s almost a prayer when he asks. _Hearing things is so much harder, so much harder to know which are real._

“What?”

“The water.”

B lurches out of the room towards the bathroom, rips back the shower curtain, but the clawfoot tub is completely dry.

In spite of himself, B holds his hand out under the green-rusted faucet to catch water he hears but cannot hold on to. The copy of _Through the Looking Glass_ is still under his arm.

“Guess it was just–” he lets his arm drop under Lawliet’s questioning gaze, “S'nothing.”

* * *

L doesn’t hear any water. He knows there _isn’t_ any water, but he sticks his hand under the faucet just the same, exactly as B did.

“No, nothing there,” he says easily, standing upright and giving B’s forearm a slow, reassuring squeeze. This part L _does_ know how to do, and he doesn’t let go until he feels B’s stiff muscles finally relax a bit.

“Let’s see what else there is around here,” he suggests, turning back into the hallway.

The apartment’s kitchen is small and looks as if it’s never seen a meal cooked there in years, though B does find a tin of one of A’s favorite brands of tea in the cupboard. L leaves him to look through it while he moves on to the bedroom, where a queen bed has been stripped of its bedding, the mattress slightly off center on the frame. The air smells dusty and undisturbed, but perhaps not quite so much as L expected, somehow. The sun streaming in the windows draws his attention to a framed painting on the wall that isn’t in A’s taste at all, so much so that L cocks his head at it, wondering how it possibly got here in the first place.

He runs his fingers over the frame, easily removing it from the wall and setting it down on the floor, revealing the small hollow that’s been carved into the plaster to hold a hidden camera. L removes it with his thumb and forefinger and examines it closely. He’s seen this model before. It can be set to take pictures on a timer, but according to the display, half the film is still remaining.

Which means that A couldn’t have put the camera there. The film would all be used by now, if that were the case.

L’s eyes dart around the room, taking in the sensors in either corner just as he hears B’s boots come creaking up behind him.

“I don’t think we’re the first people to set foot in here since A’s death,” he remarks, holding the camera out for B to assess.

* * *

 

Lawliet’s spider-hands go in and under with the same precision, the same care that he takes in examining any kind of evidence. _Even after all this time, when you know full well what I see and hear._ B breathes into Lawliet’s soft grip on his shoulder, trying to force the dripping water from eroding further into his mind. It takes sometime, but Lawliet is patient, so much more than B ever was.

It gets a little quieter, fading to a dull hum. A moment later Lawliet removes his hand, just as the desire to _move_ is crawling up on him. _His timing is still…perfect._

B straightens up and blinks, the color in the apartment becoming slightly more crystalline as Lawliet busies himself with the details, casting a soft invitation at B to join him. B follows.

_God knows where I’d be without you._

The thought hits him just as he catches sight of his ashen face in the bathroom mirror. It seems to fit for both A and Lawliet. He hurries out to join Lawliet in the main room

_“I don’t think we’re the first people to set foot in here since A’s death.”_

_“_ Cameras? Shit, someone was onto her.” B isn’t surprised, not entirely. It’s not like she hadn’t made enemies. His mind fumbles over the details of the space, thinking over the A that he knew, “D’you think the sensors might be theirs too? Let’s see if we can dig up some more. If they were sloppy they might have turned them on while they installed them, might grab a glimpse of their faces. B turns back to the bathroom, fingering around the mirror glass to check for two-way glass. It checks out as clean, but B gives the gold frame a slight tug, just in case. The mirror pulls open easily, revealing narrow alcove housing a wall safe.

 _This seems more like A’s style_. It’s not a heavy-duty safe either, nothing B would hire someone for, though it might take him a solid hour to get a handle on it. B checks his watch, “Lev, do you think you can crack a safe in less than ten minutes?”

* * *

L climbs up on the kitchen counter to examine one of the sensors up close. It’s been wired through the plaster wall, as he thought, and it’s a German brand that he himself rarely uses. He snaps a photograph of it with his Minox just as B calls for him from the bathroom.

_“Lev, do you think you can crack a safe in less than ten minutes?”_

L frowns slightly and jumps down from the counter, heading for the bathroom.

“Ten minutes?” he eyes the wall safe tucked above and behind the sink, right where the mirror once was. “I’m good, but I’m not a magician.”

The safe is model he’s familiar with and would have no trouble cracking, given an hour or so and a stethoscope. But short on time, they might be better off guessing the combination.

L’s gaze drifts to the book B’s left on the toilet tank. “You were closer to her than I was.” It isn’t an accusation, just a fact that’s starting to emerge from the smoke. A let B believe they were close, anyway. She had needed him. For something. “Any idea where to start on combinations?”

* * *

 

“Ace, maybe, 1 - 3 - 5? Too short for something like this though. It’ll start with an A, I’d bet a lot on that.”

The safe looks undisturbed. B’s instincts tell him that whoever placed the cameras weren’t looking for it, or perhaps any subtle tells about the woman who lived in this apartment. _Then what were they looking for?_ B follows Lawliet’s gaze to the book, an idea forming in his head, “Try _Alice, 1- 12-  9 - 3 -5″_

 _It’s a long shot, but something tells me I’m not wrong_ . Lawliet’s fingers are deft with the wheel, and there’s a satisfying _click_ when 5 hits home. Lawliet opens it slowly. It’s a shallow alcove, no doubt camouflaged by the heavy armoire in the bedroom. All it contains is the jade-colored partner to _Through the Looking Glass_ . _From one mystery to the next with you, huh?_

B snatches the book from the safe before Lawliet can reach it, flips through to the last page. _How would you feel remembering your own ‘child-life’, Ace?_ In the corner is a note in A’s elegant script, a scramble of numbers that has just the right length that one might expect for an address. B fumbles for a pen in his jacket just as he catches sight of his watch.

“Right, we’ll need more than the three minutes we’ve got to get this one-time pad.” B tucks to book under his arm, shuts the safe tightly and closes the mirror. Confident for the moment that the watchers, whoever they are, hadn’t gotten this far.  “Let’s take this and get out of here, meet that kid and see if he’s made it out.”

* * *

L is both surprised and not surprised when the _Alice_ code works, though once it does he knows that the other book will be in there, and so it is, B’s fingers scrambling over the green cover with an air of possessiveness.

 _You both make your lives into stories and symbols when you’re together,_ L realizes, the thought gone in a whisper as B jimmies the mirror back into place and heads for the exit, renewed energy in his step.

 _Made_ , L’s brain supplies the appropriate tense-shift just as he shuts the door behind them.

It’s a decent walk to St. Isaac’s Cathedral . Thoughts of A are nibbling at L – why the hidden codes, the flourishing little dramas? She’d killed herself and left no note, but seems to have anticipated that either B or L ( _or both of us_ , his brain supplies) would come to investigate after the fact.

“Is this what you expected?” He taps the book in B’s pocket. “A trail of breadcrumbs?”

* * *

“She and I…we liked our little games, I guess,” B holds his tongue and brushes Lawliet’s fingertips, knowing that L is coming step by step closer to learning the type of rhythm he and A shared. Not knowing what will come of Lawliet learning of it. “Remember how I used to tear out the last pages of her books, so she couldn’t finish ‘em? And I’d send them back on her birthday. Kept that up. Right up until the last one.”

He runs a finger along the cover of _Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland._ It’s a good memento for her, if nothing else. Magic and riddles and dream-worlds that glow in golden afternoons and tumble down a rabbit’s hole to something that may have been madness, but seemed like perfect sanity.

“I guess I really didn’t think she would go out with just _nothing_. She loved mysteries. And I mean, I thought we were close. I wish she had said–” he lets his voice die in the cool breeze as they pass by the hulking Soviet-era apartments, “Something, while she was alive. But it wasn’t really like her, either. She’s like you in that way. Always saying things in ways that are hard to see. She just had a…style to it. I mean, mostly she did it to mess with me, but sometimes it was just… all she could do, I guess. I’d just take it as it comes, try and give it in kind.”

 _Still wasn’t enough_. B fumbles in his jacket for a cigarette before his muscles tense up and betray him to his mind again.

* * *

L suppresses a frown at the comparison. His own mode of communication is perfectly direct and clear, but he suspects that it is, occasionally, not what B actually _wants_ to hear.

L always says what he wants and needs to say. A, though – L’s not sure she was capable of that.

But B might have made her wish that she was. _B can make people wish they were a lot of things._

“Well,” L nods at the book. “It looks like she’s saying something now. In her own way.”

And then they’re treading into the long shadow of the Cathedral, scanning the horse statue for a dirty, fair-haired urchin, roosting amongst the pigeons.

* * *

 

 _Horse Statue_ _[do not edit or repost]_

 

Mello rolls his shoulders while he waits, scuffing his feet against the ground and kicking pebbles while he paces around the monument. His first thought is to just leave. His second thought is that maybe, these guys aren’t going to come back. But they said they’d pay him again. The whole thing is a huge coin toss, but the bottom line is that he _really_ needs a shower, and this seems like the best way to make that happen. Now, that feels much more valuable than any money they could give him.

Plus, they remind him of Peter, and that keeps him interested. The pigeons skirt around Mello, picking at crumbs and things on the street small enough for him to even see, unfazed by the human accompaniment.

He rolls his tongue against his chapped lips, and when he catches sight of the both of them, he follows. Back to the apartment, Mello keeps his hands shoved in his pockets, and trails beside them.

Mello spots the lump of something new in their pockets, and keeping his eyes glued on the spot, he clears his throat again. “Are they dead?” he asks. Questions are dangerous, but the whole thing is playing through his head, and nothing seems to add up.

Perhaps, not the normal first conclusion, but in the last year, most people he’s known have come and gone, dead on the streets or by homicide. “You took some of their things,” Mello says, half to himself and half to both of them. And that’s one thing, if their friend’s still alive, or around. And that being said, they wouldn’t have needed to break into their apartment.

He doesn’t care one way or the other, he’s just curious.

Mello’s eyes flick up to both of their faces, and then back to the ground. He scratches at his scalp, and he’s glad for the warm water in their hotel. In his pocket, he fumbles with his journal, rubbing his fingers along the well worn spine while he chews on his tongue.

* * *

 _“Are they dead?”_ The boy is damn sharp, B will give him that. B tightens his fingers around _Alice_ , but softens his gaze when he sees the hunger in the kid’s eyes.

“Smart, huh. We didn’t kill them, if that’s what you’re asking,” B says it gently enough, but the boy’s ice-blue eyes flicker back to the ground. “They were gone before. Left some things behind, though. Things we might need.”

 _And some questions. So many._ B starts at a stride along the streets towards their room in the district a few blocks over, kicking at the cigarettes while the kid trails behind. Lawliet stays behind the both of them. “So, you got something you call yourself?”

The kid hesitates a moment, catching B’s eye for the first time. _Mihael Keehl_ floating above his forehead in shadowed red, “Mello.”

When the kid looks down again, B catches Lawliet’s eye meaningfully for a moment. _Don’t think the kid has too much to hide. But you never know_.

* * *

 

‘Mello’ ( _odd name_ , L thinks, but then he can hardly talk) is observant – too observant, maybe. L isn’t ready to get paranoid about him yet – he could just be sharp from life on the streets, after all – but he’d prefer to be the one asking questions, and somewhere less out in the open.

“Wait a moment,” L directs to B as they pass a small market. “Have a smoke or something, I’m going to swing in for a few supplies.” B nods and slouches against the brick wall while Mello scuffs around in a circle, looking at his feet.

L hurries down the aisles and fills a basket with a little of this and that. A new package of pens, some coca-cola, apples, biscuits, and an assortment of sweets – chocolate bars and some hard candies with fizzy centers. He fumbles out some rubles to the clerk and tells her to keep the change.

“More food if you’re still hungry later,” he says once he’s back outside, showing Mello the paper sack. “Hotel’s this way.”

L lets B take the lead again, keeping an eye out for anyone following by foot or by car as they finish up the walk to the hotel. Except for the girl at the front desk who’s talking animatedly on the phone, the lobby is mostly quiet; they take the rickety elevator up to their room near the top without her even noticing.

 _Shouldn’t be coming along with strangers_ , L thinks at the top of Mello’s blond head. _Not even for a hot shower._

Either the kid doesn’t know how bad it can get on the streets, or he does know, and he’s willing to risk it. L’s not sure which of those options is worse.

“Want me to carry that?” B gives him an odd look and reaches for the groceries.

_Cue Elevator Music_ [do not edit or repost]

The elevator’s opened. L hadn’t noticed.

“Thanks, got it,” L mutters, pushing on ahead of him.

The hotel room is stuffy and badly needs airing out. B throws open the windows while L sets the groceries on a chair. “Soap and shampoo and things are on the shelf above the sink,” he directs to Mello. “Use whatever you like. Should be lots of hot water this time of day.”

* * *

While Mihael, or _Mello_ as he said, takes a shower, B grabs a pen and starts extracting the secret key to crack A’s code. It’s a simple enough shift forward– with every digit in the secret key moving up the letters in the message a corresponding amount in the alphabet.

The key is constructed from the digits of Euler’s number, with no key being used twice, every message being encoded with a key as long as the message. _Keeps it secure as it gets, assuming no one has the digits of e memorized_. The code is old, Lawliet’s invention, and he and A haven’t used it much in the years since the three of them worked together.

 _Still, after seven years that means a lot of fucking fractions._ B shifts himself into Lawliet’s ‘thinking squat’, which always helped him concentrate a tiny bit. B and A’s last secure exchange of messages left them on digit 2137, and the last message was several months ago. The first thousand digits B pulls out of his memory, roughly speaking, but other thousand or so are all number crunching.

B was never great with numbers. Lawliet cocks his head at B’s work, then starts wordlessly on a page of his own at the other side of the desk. B inclines his head, “It’ll be digit 2137 if it’s addressed to me.” B says quietly.

“6029, though I doubt it’s mine.” Of course Lawliet would have sent more high-security messages to A in that time.

They scribble in silence for a while, while the water runs, “What do you think about the kid? I think we can still use him, to be honest. Dunno how much to tell him, but we could use some allies here.”

Lawliet nods slowly, and is about to speak when the bathroom door opens, and Mello slumps out. When he squats on the floor the same way that the two of them are on the chairs, B has to smile a little. _Like one of us already._

“S’no problem. So, you got anywhere to stay?” B asks, well knowing the answer, and Mello shakes his head once, “You really shouldn’t trust people like us, that’s advice number one. Lucky for you we aren’t bad people. But we aren’t that good either.”

* * *

Even though the windows are wide open, the heat of the room feels more oppressive than before, squeezing at L’s lungs like a fist. He’s only half aware of the numbers he’s jotted down, his attention dragged away by the boy squatting on the floor, his blond hair damp and sticking to his cheeks.

Taking on a street kid desperate for food and a shower as an “ally” doesn’t strike him as fair bargaining, not at all. If L were ten or eleven again he wouldn’t give it a second thought, but he’s older now. A lot older than he wants to be.

“There’s chocolate and apples in the sack, if you want any,” he says, almost instantly cringing at the words. Offers of food and shelter always seem harmless, and it’s a tactic perpetrators know all too well. “Don’t eat any if you don’t want to,” he adds roughly, looking at no one. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Including stick around here.”

He sets down his pen and glances at Mello through his drift of black hair. “Or is this truly the safest place you could be right now?  

* * *

 

Mello pulls himself up onto his feet, hesitant before making his way over to the bag of food. He fishes out a bar of chocolate, ripping the wrapping off of it. “No one is _really_ kind,” Mello says flatly, breaking off a piece of chocolate with much more aggression than necessary. He’d learned that as soon as his father’d laced that car with mercury and blew himself sky high. And he’d learned it again and again, from when his mother’d been killed to every step he took through this God damned city. _I don’t trust you_ , he thinks, flicking his eyes from Rue and then to Lev.

But they don’t seem to care what he says one way or another. He pops the candy into his mouth, sweet and foreign on his tongue. It was something that normally, he wouldn’t even think about being able to buy. He’d shoplifted candy bars in the past, but food with actual substance always took priority.

It’s discomforting, that Lev can see through him so quickly, but then again, his situation can hardly be hidden. “I don’t have many choices,” he admits. It’s either this, the orphanage–which is absolutely out of the question–or the streets. He can’t remember the last time he’s slept in an actual, fully functional building. And in a bed, no less. He looks at Lev, right at his face, and he catches a look that tells him that this isn’t new. That Mello is certainly not the first kid they’ve seen like this.

It’s fine. That’s not really his business. “Try to stick with someone else, but it’s not really…something I can do right now.”

With everyone seeming to drop like flies around him, it’s less than ideal to stay on the streets. At night, it means finding someplace to sleep where no one could run into him. And it isn’t just cops, it’s _everyone,_ in one way or another. He wanders over to Rue and Lev, and the papers they have spread in front of them.

“This stuff’s from your friend?” he asks bluntly, peering at Rue’s pen while he writes. It’s all letters and fractions and so many things that he doesn’t really understand. It’s coding, that much he follows, but it’s so complicated that he realizes that okay, these guys must be really fucking smart.

* * *

“Yeah. They left us some clues, I guess. S’our job to piece them together.” B turns his head slightly to catch Mello’s eye. _Wary, curious, a little excited._

“Your job?” the kid’s voice is even that particular innocent modulation that B himself used to use to keep people talking.

“Yeah, it’s what we do, sort of. Puzzles. Kind of like the police, but not at all. Though this one’s a little more personal, cause they were a friend.”

There’s a sharp folding of paper from across the table. B catches Lawliet’s dark eyes. Discomfort is radiating off of him in the twitch of his fingertips. _He’s not alright with the kid_ . B bites his lip, coming to terms a moment later with _why._

 _We really could have been anyone this kid trusted_. And while B’s got a sense that Mello’s a little more than meets the eye, he’s young and could hold them back. He’s a risk.

_But we can’t just leave him here, Lawliet._

B sucks in his breath, finishing up the secret key and coming up with more garbage. He glances across the table. “You got anything over there? Mine is just a mess, unless I’ve fucked up the calculations again.”

Lawliet nods once, passing the folded piece of paper across the table. B shies away from Mello’s prying eyes, and motions to the bathroom with the hand signal for _speak shaded_. Lawliet stands, neatening his papers to a stack. “We’re gonna need to talk about this a moment. D’you mind? You can stick around, cause it’s getting late to go anyplace, but we need to talk about this and it’s a little classified. Or something.”

Mello nods, retreats back on the bed next to the wall in a tense seat. Lawliet seems jumpy, leaving the street kid in the room. “We’ll only be a minute.” B says to both of them, really. He pulls the door to the tiny bathroom shut, staring at Lawliet’s hard black eyes.

“So it’s written to you,” B wants to dwell on that, gives the address a once-over, but instead scribbles a question on the notepaper. _We don’t know the kid doesn’t speak English_.

‘WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT MELLO?’

* * *

The bathroom sink has a persistent drip, the noise like a ticking clock echoing in the small space. L leans against the porcelain and sucks lightly on the end of his knuckle, staring wordlessly into B’s eyes for a moment before reaching for the pen in his hand.

“I think I have a rough idea of where this address is,” L says, keeping up the facade of discussing A in the verbal, and Mello in the written. “Lots of Soviet-era apartment blocks there, nothing like that historical, Count Pavel Suzor building.”

As he speaks, he writes in neat, crisp print: _‘I understand why you invited him in, but I don’t believe we are necessarily the safest element for him right now, for a whole host of reasons.’_

He sees B pull in a breath and adds, quickly, _‘I’m not saying we should turn him out for the night.’_

L’s not really sure what he’s saying at all, is the thing. Where else can Mello go? Short of buying him some clean clothes and putting him on the first plane to Heathrow, where a car from Wammy’s will be waiting, L doesn’t have any ideas. And maybe that one isn’t so bad, anyway.

“Not sure what she would want with such a place,” he continues, returning his eyes to the address. “Might be good for disappearing into.”

* * *

B’s head spins, and the bathroom drip is boring into his mind the same way it did in A’s apartment. “Yeah, I’d like to look into it.” _Soon_ . B’s legs itch to take to the streets, dig and get to the bottom of this. _If we’re not going to use Mello, then best get started_.

‘I THINK HE’S LIKE US. SHARP KID. REMINDS ME OF’ B hesitates on the last word ‘ME. I DON’T THINK WE SHOULD LET THIS ONE GO.’

B gives Lawliet a searching look, reaching for the inside of his wrist with a fingertip. Trying to think of what to do. _It’s a long shot, and I don’t think Mello will like it. We need his trust first._

‘YOU STILL TAKING SUCCESSORS? IF WE SEE WHAT THIS ONE CAN DO, HE MIGHT BE A GOOD ONE’ he scrawls, his gut clenching thinking of what became of the last one.

 _So it goes, I guess. Life goes on. A would have wanted that, I think_ . The sick feeling in his gut intensifies with the uncertainty in what A _did_ want. _It’s not like he could fucking replace her._ B shakes a hand through his hair, tightening his fingers around Lawliet’s pulse to reach for a sense of calm.

“Was she looking into a case? Didn’t know her to stray off work too often, even when we did relax together. Maybe we can pick up the leads.”

* * *

 

In a way, L is glad he’s forced to have the more difficult half of this conversation in writing. Were he allowed to use his tongue, a number of potentially careless things might flick from it, like _Not every street kid with sharp wits is a manifestation of you, B…_ And, also: _Just like A wasn’t really anything like you, even if she may have wanted to be._

He presses his lips together and sketches his words out slowly. _‘I’ve heard good things about Jeevas. In any case, the school would be a safer place to see what Mello can do, and he can always be a regular student if that’s where his talents lie.’_

B’s fingers on his wrist are too hot, but L doesn’t shake his hand off. If they’re going to give things another go, then he needs to be patient. B has no idea how it feels, after all. Like a shackle. Like the light caress of manipulation. At least it isn’t fingers in his hair, because L knows he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from jerking away from that kind of touch.  

It’s just one of those days, but it will pass. Taking a dexy will help. For the moment he goes limp against the sink, though, lets the white fuzz in his head creep in and take over.

“Don’t know what she was up to. Best way to find out is check out the place. See if the neighbors know anything, maybe.” His voice sounds a little rusty, maybe, but otherwise as normal as ever.

* * *

Lawliet’s pulse has quickened far too much to be calming to either of them.  B loosens his fingers on Lawliet’s wrist, gives him some space. There’s not a lot of air in the small room. The way Lawliet is bent into himself reminds him too much of the protective hunch of several years ago. _Scars are still there._

He reaches his hand up to Lawliet’s shoulder, but lets it fall without touching when he sees the way the muscles knot against Lawliet’s shoulder blade, despite how his fingers itch for Lawliet’s bones. _Guess they didn’t really fade. Maybe I can try….to do better this time. Be the someone you needed me to be then._

_Show you that you need me now._

‘ALRIGHT. YOUR CALL.’

“Might go out after this then, and scope it. Are you okay with Mello? For now?” B lets a gentleness into his voice. Lawliet nods, staring at the shower curtain with haunted, distant eyes. B leaves him in the room, ghosts of the past still burning at his fingertips.

Mello waits on the bed, having removed his shoes like Lawliet. B sits opposite him, exhaling for a long while, “You should sleep here for the night. Lev is going to be working, and I’ll be here for a bit, but I need to get some foot-work done.”

He hesitates before continuing, “We…know a place where you can go. It’s not anywhere around here, but they’re good with kids. I grew up there, so did Lev.” _It’s been that long, with us_. The thought catches B by the throat.

* * *

Mello waits, swinging his legs back and forth in one of the chairs, knotting his fingers into the fabric of his shirt. It takes too long, and he knows he shouldn’t but he finds himself flipping through the copy of _Alice_ discarded by him, as well as the notes. It’s all fractions and shit that he doesn’t really get, but he spots an address staring clearly up at him. On the wrapper of his chocolate bar, he jots the letters down, and crams it into his pocket.

 _If their friend wanted them to find it, wouldn’t they have made it easier_?

He understands secrecy, but not to this extent.

More out of curiosity, he thinks he’ll give it a look. None of this has to do with him, but he’s compelled to keep the information with him. Peeling that part off of the chocolate, he tucks the square of aluminum into one of his pockets. Flipping through the book again, he hums to himself while his eyes scan the pages. It’s a story he’s heard before, and one he’s not very fascinated by. Kicking his shoes off, he sits himself down on the bed.

When Rue comes out, he sits across from him, and talks.

“Oh,” Mello mumbles in response. “Okay.”

And then the talk about leaving comes up.

_Yeah, kid, we’ll get you someplace that’ll take care of you_

_Hey, Moscow’s got a real good house. Kids get adopted quick from there._

_Adopted._

_Well…yeah, it’s like an orphanage, but it’s really good. They’ll feed you. You’ll be warm in the winter and everything_.

Mello sneers, eyes wide and lips twisted into a snarl. Harsher than he intended. No. No, _no_ he was not doing that again. No. Chechnya was hell, Moscow nearly got his head bashed in, and in St. Petersburg he was better off in the streets. It makes sense, that they weren’t fazed by him. Because at one point, they _were_ like him. But he doesn’t take off.

He still needs a place to sleep.

Mello really doesn’t know what the hell to do. But Lev told him not to do anything he didn’t want to. So he takes a few steps from the bed, breathes, and looks back at Rue. His heart is slamming so hard that he can hear it in his ears.

“Why’d she like that book?” he mumbles soon after, as if Rue hadn’t said anything at all. _It’s a shitty story_. He doesn’t mention anything about the address. “Did you decode all of it? Does it make sense?” He asks as many questions as he can, like a normal child would.

_“Why’d she like that book?  Did you decode all of it? Does it make sense?”_

* * *

 

“Listening at doors is rude, and a good skill.” B inclines his head, switching back to English since it’s clear Mello can understand it. Mello seems surprised, but not chastened. Though he’s seen the feral curl of Mello’s lip, and knows they’re already asking too much of the kid to go to Wammy’s so soon.

 _Would have been easier to take him out on watch with me, get to know him a little better. “_ We got what we needed, yeah. Just an address, Kalinsky District I wanna say.”

B wracks his brain for how the intuitive trust cemented between a much-smaller Lawliet and himself so many years ago. Like steel to flint, the two of them sparked off each other immediately, B declaring his allegiance to the pale, dark-eyed boy almost from the moment they’d met in London’s grey December.

 _Well, that or taking on New York together. First case._ B nibbles at the skin at his knuckles, studying Mello a moment. _Best keep it neutral. Might be better if he doesn’t have any family murders to investigate, after all._ B settles for a question, to open him up a little. _“_ Where did you pick up the English, huh? Can you speak it as well as understand it? You speak anything else?”

* * *

“You should’ve been more quiet,” Mello snaps back, still touchy about the orphanage subject. His English is fluent but his accent is thick. Rue drops the whole idea, so he takes another deep breath and tries to calm himself down. His temper, everyone always told him, will be what does him in. But Mello hums when the address is mentioned, and rolls his neck. “You’ll go there, then?“

He wants to like Rue, because there’s something about him that’s familiar. It doesn’t really matter—he’s already making plans to get the hell out of here by morning.

“My family went to the States for work,” Mello mumbles, sitting himself back down on the bed and breaking off another piece of chocolate. “My…father.” God, that sounded awful, coming off of his tongue. _Fuck him, useless bastard_. “He used to speak around the house a lot. So I learned. At the library, they have books in English, too.”  

He sucks on the end of the chocolate before pushing it entirely into his mouth, swallowing after only a few bites. “In town, kids knew Arabic. I can understand a little, but I can’t speak well,” he admits, and takes a quick glance at Rue’s face. Snapping off another piece of chocolate, Mello inches himself off of the bed to hand it to him.

 _You remind me of my friends_ , Mello wants to say, but he thinks that’s too much, and he decides to keep working away at his candy bar instead.

* * *

 

B takes the chocolate from Mello’s ragged-bitten fingernails. It tastes bitter. _This kid has seen some shit. Daddy issues too_. They feel like real comrades now, in some war B’s been fighting too long to remember if there’s a life beyond the edges of the trenches.

“S’good. I speak a bunch of languages, mainly for the mob scene, but picked up more than a few in Winchester, where I grew up, and around the world, I guess.” It’s a little hard to swallow the chocolate, “So d’you spend a lot of time at the library?”

Mello nods, barely stifling a yawn. With his pale-blue eyes shut, he looks a lot younger, and it hits B in the chest a little.

“I’ll let you get some sleep, huh.” B smiles a little weakly, “Thanks for the chocolate, Mello. Don’t worry, Lev will be quiet while I’m gone.”

B is already reaching for his jacket, wanting to get out and hit the streets, make up for lost time. _After all, it’s A’s memory that we came for, not her replacement_. He stares for a moment at the bathroom door, wondering if he should say anything to Lawliet.

 _Better let him…brood. He’ll still be here when I get back_.

* * *

**June 3 1998 [9:47pm]**

It’s well and truly dark when B rounds the corner of Nauki road to the heart of the Kalinsky district. The motorbike is inconspicuous, especially in the neighbourhood of the address. The rusted spokes fit right in amidst the sewers choked with cigarette butts, bizarrely abstracted graffiti where B stashes his bike.

 _Feels more like work I’d take._ But then again, he and A had clinched more than a few cases in tandem.

The address leads to another apartment, this one crumbling, rickety balconies and peeling paint. At this hour of the night it’s loud, people smoking and shrieking, thrumming of music just a bit too loud, domestic arguments coloured with the wail of hungry children.

 _Yeah, if this isn’t work, not sure what it is._ B paces around the edge of the building, taking note of the entrances and exits. There’s a large cemetery next to the building, a generous grove of trees at its corner. _Wonder if it’s be decent cover_. He flickers on a cheap flashlight he picked up from the airport and heads in.

It’s not bad, more graffiti scrawled on the _trees,_ which is itself unusual. The edge extends to the other road, and if B had to, he might be able to navigate the bike along the path there.

B has to swallow a scream when his light falls over the corpse.

_There are zombies in St Petersburg. Isn’t that what she’d said on the phone?_

B’s seen a lot of shit, _done_ a lot of shit but the dead man’s face is one bloody yellow pustule, the lips swallowed back into the bones of his jaw. Eyes rolled open. _Like some kinda overdose_. Bile crowds the back of B’s throat. It’s something he could believe he imagined if it weren’t for the cloying smell of rotting skin.

B runs to the pay phone a block over, dials for emergency with barely any details except the location. He wants to take an out on this one, maybe vomit up breakfast in the dumpster, but that isn’t what he’s for, nor what he’s made for. The second time he flashes his light over the corpse, the rotten skin of the leg reminds him of spiderwebs. It’s a little fascinating, and it scares him a bit the way his eyes want to linger, almost touch.

B tries to ignore the sensation of spiders crawling over his skin as he waits tucked behind a tree to see what becomes of the poor fucker. It takes the police hours too long to arrive. _Of course, he’s dead, so it’s not like it matters_.

“Shit, is that what this is about?” Gruff, heavy Russian accompanies the sharp light of police flashlights over the grove, “Hate these calls.”

“I want to stop looking at these ones, they’re disgusting. Need a garbage disposal for them, not a policeman.”

“Yeah well, they’d need a detective but that’s not my job. Not yet it isn’t.”

“We keep finding more of them. Where’s the investigation going?”

“That’s it though. There is no investigation. They might as well be trash, as far as the heads are concerned. Come on. Ambulance should be here in a bit.”

_Something ugly that the detectives aren’t looking at. Big and hideous and possibly miles deep._

_Well, this does seem like your style, doesn’t it, Acey?_

B blinks at the quiet moonrise over the edge of the cemetery, where whooping figures are already starting to dance and stagger among the dead. Next to a grave-marker, a hulking red-haired apparition with a grin sewn shut waves at him.

B waves back.

 

 

 


	4. June 4 1998

**June 4, 1998 [12:11 am]**

After midnight the hotel room has finally cooled enough to feel nearly pleasant, and L sits at a chair with his feet curled onto the windowsill, three slim notebooks slanted in his lap. He’s started filling out the one on top with notes on A: a description of the _Alice_ book, a rough blueprint of her apartment’s layout, makes and models of the sensors, cameras, and wall safe. He doesn’t know if there’s a real mystery here or not, but he’s become more certain that A wanted both of them to think that there was.

 _She expected us to come together,_ he realizes. The symbolic books (smoke and mirrors, really) were for B, the Euler’s number for L.

It’s not too wild a conclusion for her to have arrived at. He and B were going to reunite in some context, eventually, it was just a matter of where and when the first domino would fall.

L takes a bite from his half-eaten apple and wonders if it’s a reunion A would have approved of. His eyes fall onto the rumpled blankets of the bed where he and B fucked last night and decides that no, she probably wouldn’t have liked it, even if she knew it was inevitable.

If anything, L suspects that A strongly preferred them apart.

Mello’s been sleeping on the other bed for the last few hours, almost utterly quiet but for the occasional deep, somnolent breath. Either he doesn’t have nightmares or he’s learnt to keep company with them.

L returns to his notebook and scratches out a few more notes, finishing the apple and setting the core on the windowsill. Waiting for either the sun to come up or B to return – whichever comes first.

* * *

 

It’s too hot, but Mello pulls himself under the covers and buries his face in the clean hotel pillow. It’s soft, encompassing, and it puts him to sleep before he knows it. It’s perfect, because this way, he doesn’t dream. It’s comfortable nothingness. Hell, he doesn’t even know he’s unconscious until his eyes are cracking open again to take in the amber lighting around him.

Mello’s pulled back to reality when he forgets where the hell he is. Not in the school building he usually breaks into, and not in the street. He jolts up, throwing the covers off. His eyes are wide, staring at the wall across from him until everything pieces itself back together. _Okay_ , he’s in the hotel. Mello gives a shaky exhale, and his head rolls to the side to set his gaze on Lev.

Rue, by now, is long gone.

Perfect.

Mello is fine with him, but not enough to risk sticking around. Near the windowsill, Lev is perched up in his chair, scrawling hastily into a notebook.

He’s not sure if the two of them discussed the idea Rue’d had, but he was more than certain that Lev wasn’t about to put up a large fight to keep him here. Rustling through his pockets to make sure he still had his money and his journal, Mello then slid himself out of bed to pull his boots back on.

While Mello triple knots his laces, his eyes make their way back up to Lev. It’s late. Three in the morning, to be exact. It looks like there are no intentions of him resting soon.

“I”m not going with you,” Mello states softly, just loud enough for Lev to hear.

* * *

 

L sets down his pen and notebook when he hears the bedsprings creak, followed by Mello’s quiet voice. His hair must have still been damp when he fell asleep, because it’s rumpled on one side, making him look even younger, somehow.

“As I said before, you can do what you like.” L tucks his feet on the edge of the chair and rests his chin on his knee, tilting his head in Mello’s direction. “The place we could send you to, though, it’s not like any place you’ve ever stayed before.” He tugs at the ragged hem of his jeans, the rough sensation of the fabric between his fingers nearly hypnotic. “It’s a huge, old, fancy house, more like a special school than an orphanage. And they don’t just teach regular subjects, but things that someone your age can’t learn anywhere else.” He pauses, remembering the first time he’d convinced Wammy to schedule a six-week intensive on secret codes. “But you can also just paint landscapes all day, if you want to. Or play the violin. It’s all very self-directed.”

Mello’s eyes have widened slightly, perhaps because L has just said more to him now than he has all day.

“Just something to consider,” L says lightly. “We don’t stay in one place for very long, so it’s unlikely you’ll see us again after this.”

* * *

 

Mello swallows thick. He wants to believe Lev, but it’s _always_ supposed to be different.

The streets are a false sense of security, because he knows them. Every crack in the pavement and every tunnel beneath the skyscrapers. It’s filthy, but he can survive. “I…” _I want to. Who wouldn’t want that_? Mello shakes his head, though, because it doesn’t matter what he wants.

It’s how these disasters pan out.

Still, he hesitates, because he _really_ wants this. He wants it to be true, he can’t bring himself to do it.

Mello shrugs, and shoves his hands into his pockets. “No,” he mumbles, and adverts his gaze. _Fuck_. He rubs one of his feet against his ankle, scraping at the fabric of his worn pants. It’s fine, that he won’t see them again. “I can’t,” he admits. He can’t, because he’s terrified.

After all, it’s not like these two were depending on him.

“Thank you, again,” he says. For the shelter, and for not making him follow.

Outside, Mello wanders through the streets, the chocolate wrapper clenched tight in his hand. He’s fascinated, by their whole ordeal. Not enough to risk another orphanage, but enough to check it out on his own. Not now. It’s still late, and it’s dangerous for him to move that far across the city in the dark.

Mello wants to have a future, but he can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to have any sort of aspirations outside of survival.

* * *

 

**June 4, 1998 [1:12 am]**

It’s crossing the early morning when B makes it back to the hotel. Despite the nausea and the images of the rotten man burned into his retina, B picks up _barankas_ and several chocolate bars before he heads back in. _In case Mello is up._

He’s looking over his shoulder the entire way home, not entirely sure if the skitter of rats along the streets is something he’s imagining. Images of A keep bleeding into something grotesque in his mind, and his eyes haven’t made something like the cemetery-dweller in a while. _Not since that heart attack that got ahead of when it was supposed to._

_It’s a bad omen._

B takes the steps a little too quickly, closes the door a little too tightly for Lawliet not to look up sharply, arresting black eyes holding him where he is. _Safe. For now_. B tries to start, holds up a finger as the bile creeps up his throat again.

“Alright, so I’ve been there, seen something seriously fucked up–” he stops, looks around the tiny room. His heart beginning to sink with what he should have realized was inevitable from the kid’s terrified glare.

“Where’s Mello?” he asks, though he knows the kid is long gone.

* * *

 

L is just finishing up a call to Wammy (via cell phone this time) to get updates on his other open cases when B bursts into the room, trembling on his feet like an unsteady colt.

_“…I’ve been there, seen something seriously fucked up–”_

For a moment, L wonders if the hallucinations have come back, even worse this time around – but B’s face doesn’t quite have the mask of uncertain desperation that L associates with those moments. Still, there’s a sheen of sweat glazed on his forehead, a sickly pallor to his cheeks. His hands shake and pat at his pockets, as if half-looking for a cigarette.

“What happened?” L asks, hopping from his chair before the question about Mello fully registers. L shakes his head faintly, scuffing across the threadbare rug toward B. “He didn’t want to stay. I did tell him about Wammy’s though. Made it sound good – maybe too good.”

Mello’s decision hadn’t surprised L. Sometimes a harsh but familiar reality becomes its own form of comfort, because at least it’s familiar, at least it’s not the vast unknown.

L takes a seat on their bed and tugs at B’s wrist. “Sit down. You don’t look well.”

* * *

 

“Shit, shit. I _knew it_ , knew it.” B grips at Lawliet’s wrist, lets himself be dragged down to the surface of the bed. _God I hope Mello doesn’t deal in anything like that, doesn’t get caught up in it._

 _He’s sharp. And I probably would have done the same, being him._ The thought doesn’t lend B much comfort. But Lawliet’s skin is slightly warm over his quick-beat pulse, his bones first against his fingertips. _Mello didn’t want to stay. So that’s it._

B takes another breath in, out. Lawliet is patient. That’s always helped. He starts talking, “Found a corpse. In the cemetery next to A’s apartment. Looked like an overdose, but. Fucking worse. The entire face was…rotten from the inside out. Barely any jaw left. Looked like his skin was made of ash.”

Lawliet’s eyes are searching gently, and B seeks them like an anchor from the images that threaten to drag themselves out into the open, “I mean, it looked like something I could have _seen_ , but there was the _smell_. So I put in a tip to the police. Waited it out, like I do. They’d seen something like this before. Maybe many times. But there’s no investigation, or so they said. No one gives a damn what these people are dying from.”

B finds the pack of cigarettes in his jacket, lights one with shaking hands, “Or maybe they want ‘em to keep dying.”

* * *

 

L starts combing through the threads at the hem of his jeans again, his fingers erratic even as his other hand lays calm inside B’s palm until B pulls loose to light his cigarette.

“And you think it was drugs and not just ordinary decay?” L frowns inwardly, sorting the details out in his mind. A cemetery is a public place, any bodies dumped there would be reported or dragged away, at least, so it must have been left there recently. “Or perhaps some kind of wasting disease?” An outbreak is the sort of thing the authorities might try to cover up, but to purposefully _not_ investigate it would be almost unheard of.

“Did they sound as if they’d been ordered not to investigate? To turn a blind eye?” The idea isn’t beyond the pale at all. In fact, in the past L has solved a few cases that some officials would have definitely preferred remain unsolved. Sometimes, it’s even a good way to keep the balances of power in check.

Realizing he’s just unleashed a barrage of questions at B, L pinches his lips shut and waits to hear more, allowing the wreathes of B’s smoke rings to settle around them.

* * *

 

“Yeah, that’s what got me the most. They weren’t acting like the body was contagious. And the eyes– looked a little like heroin, and I’ve seen a lot of that shit. Body was fresh, looked like. Blood wasn’t very far gone.” the images are bursting out of B’s eyelids _get out get out, “_ Should have brought a camera. But I think I can show you what I mean.”

B reaches for the sketchbook on the bedside, but his fingers still shake a little, and Lawliet places a hand on his thigh. _God. Thank you_.

He sucks up the smoke until it burns his throat, closing his eyes slightly, lacing Lawliet fingertips with his other hand. The nicotine and the images behind his eyelids soak into a dark corner of his mind, painted with bird-wings, bloodied bones, the only thought scrawled there being _survive, survive_.

He stubs out the cigarette, picks up the charcoal, begins.

The head takes shape first, the spiderwebbed hand hung on to the neck. The eye rolled open. The eye squeezed shut. With every stroke the revulsion gives way to fascination. Thoughts of _how_ and _how long_ , chemistry, logistics of decay creep into his mind like worms. _It all becomes normal if you look at it long enough._

B is in the business of looking.

The only sign that Lawliet is present is a gentle tightening of his warm fingertips as the man’s face takes shape. For B’s part, his mind is working overtime to parse the images into something he can’t turn away from. But his body relaxes against Lawliet’s pulse. It’s a strange juxtaposition, the comfort of so many years before, the reality of the way he copes now. But by the time the drawing is finished, he’s able to see something beautiful in the swell of the eye, the bloody gape of the mouth.

_Zombies She Said_ [do not edit or repost]

He tries to shove the curious thought of how _one_ might recreate an image like that to the back of his psyche. When he turns, the ghost of the man’s face shimmers over Lawliet’s face before familiar black eyes drag him back to reality. He swallows, kisses the smooth, alive skin of Lawliet’s jaw quickly before scrawling a name on the sketch.

“She mentioned ‘zombies’, back when we met up for her birthday in ‘97. When she called me from the first apartment. Like a rumour back then, or one of her jokes. She was just off wetwork in Sarajevo then, but came to see me right after. She didn’t mention it then–” B hesitates because the memory there is _ugly_ and not one he’s willing to open up with Lawliet just yet, “I’d bet she didn’t take it on as a case until…much later.”

* * *

 

While B sketches, L dips his head once to take a drag from the cigarette clenched between B’s free hand, coughing a little at the invasive smoke but savoring the harsh flavor. It reminds him of B now and years ago, and how neither of them have ever really been clean. Not really.

But L most of all, maybe. B’s fingers are all edgy grace as they move over the paper, dirt and ink ground into his cuticles, and L watches them with an almost mesmerized focus. The body that emerges is grotesque and horrifying, but not something L can easily pull his eyes away from, even as he wishes he had seen it in person, his eyes taking in the actual color and texture of its rotting flesh.

L has a hard time not looking at monsters.

“Zombies, is it?” He tilts his head at the sketch. “Reminds me a little of those old photographs of syphilis patients.”

_But was she talking in symbols at you, knowing how it’s your second language?_

“That meeting with A was over a year ago.” L nods at the paper. “If this is the same thing, then the authorities have been ignoring it for a long time. The locals living on the streets will know something.”

B seems more calm, his breaths more even beneath the cage of his ribs, but L can see that there are withheld words swimming behind his eyes.

B isn’t the type to hold back, so when he does, L usually lives with it. The mind is one’s only real privacy, and B has as much a right to his secrets as anyone else. But right now, L isn’t really in the mood for secrets. They came here to solve the mystery of A, which means that B can’t withhold potential evidence. And neither can L.

“Why do you think she wouldn’t have taken it on as a case until ‘much later?’” His hand moves from B’s ribs to his back, tee-shirt bunching between his fingertips as he drags his fingernails up the bony knobs of B’s spine.

_I know your first language, though._

* * *

 

 _Does he know?_ B’s skin crawls as two memories juxtapose themselves over the rake of Lawliet’s fingernails, one where a much younger Lawliet clings too him far too desperately, another where a red-headed girl whispers _you can close your eyes_ in his ear. _Is this an interrogation or a conversation?_ He keeps his breathing the same, poker face, while he assesses how to frame this.

Based on the bitterness that L showed towards Aiber in Vegas, well. The odds are good that jealousy could work in his favour. _I’ll make you bet you won’t want to walk away._

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this since—felt like one of her secrets that should’ve stayed buried. But A and I didn’t just talk. We had a bit of…well, it was something like a relationship, back in ’95 it was like that at least. She was there at the right time, back when I was all fucked up over you, and the mess I’d made of everything,” he takes a shaky drag from the cigarette, and yeah, it’s memory, but it’s also calculated, “We hit the road together, she’d patch me up, and we’d screw in that old car, hotel rooms, anytime we weren’t working. It was a hell of a time. She taught me about marksmanship, we’d do disguise together. Sometimes we were even happy.”

There’s a fondness he doesn’t have to force into his voice. Yeah, it had been nice, for a time, having A to talk with. There was something about her that always felt a little airy, a little choking, but she was _there_ and that made the difference. _I owe her for that_.

“But she jumped ship by the end of the year. She got too close, and I…I didn’t. She left just before December, said she’d be back but,” he waves his hand with an air of resignation, “We kept in touch over distance, barely. When I saw her in ’97, it was for her birthday _._ Things almost started up again. But it was all wrong this time. I couldn’t have her like that—and she wasn’t anything like you. Not that she wasn’t trying, but that was it.”

 _All in._ He doesn’t look at Lawliet, just lays his cigarette into the ashtray.

“I’m amazed our friendship stayed okay. I was her first lover, too. Maybe only. I dunno why she stuck around in ’95, when I was such a fuckup. But she did. And she still did.” he exhales, something between the painful truth and another wager slipping from his lips, “S’part of why I wanted to get to the bottom of this, I guess.”

* * *

 

Before he realizes what he’s doing, L has melted away from B, his hand dragging down his back and settling onto the bed, air seemingly frozen in his lungs before the pain in his chest pushes it back out again.

_For fuck’s sake, A. I knew you probably gave him your body. Did you have to give him the entire fairy-tale, too?_

He stands up from the bed and walks over to the window, breaking off a piece of chocolate from a half-eaten bar and letting the candy melt on his tongue, the rhythm of the sparse traffic on the streets below lulling him into space that feels slower, quieter.

“I’m not surprised you had something like that with her,” he says, the calm in his voice an attempt to batten down the anger, the dim shock (because he’s never really that shocked about anything, when it comes to A) laying heavy as lead in his gut.

None of the anger is for him, it’s for B. B – whose affection for her is still warm on his tongue, making his words go runny with barely checked sentiment.

 _I should have taken you to Detroit,_ he thinks. _You would have seen her without any of her masks. You could have protected yourself._

L and A were friends, of a sort. Maybe “alliance” is a better word. A had no choice but to surrender, and she’d made the best of it. In time, she became quite good at adapting to who and what L needed, and through the haze of memory he can see himself standing at the window of his room at Wammy’s house, looking out at the Spring-green moors and hating the landscape because there was no B there, anymore. Just vast, empty space.

A was good at filling empty space.

“B –” The words jam up at the back of his mouth. L doesn’t want to tell. Doesn’t want to take things away from him. L can live without knowing the mystery of A because he can practically guess at the truth, now. He touches his fingers to his lips, slowly licking off the lingering streaks of chocolate. _Bread crumb trails always lead somewhere bad._

But L isn’t the type to drop a case once he’s in, and B knows that. L doesn’t back out, not even when he damn well should.

“She was in love with you,” he finally concludes, then amends: “Or thought she was. Thought it was something she wanted.”

* * *

 

“Yeah. I couldn’t give her what she was after,” the absence of Lawliet’s warmth leaves B wanting to drag him back to the side of the bed at least, already tired by the night’s ventures. But there’s a distant anger broiling underneath Lawliet, and B half-wonder’s if he’s made the wrong call.

 _Too late to go back now._  

“It was. Different. To be on the other side of that, I guess. I won’t say I didn’t use her, and that might have been what– ” his voice dies, unable to quite finish the thought. “Well. I mean between the two of us, I’m surprised I’m the one that survived it. But maybe I shouldn’t be.”

He shakes a hand through his hair, the guilt clamouring caustic at his throat, his eyes starting to throb strangely. _You did what you could._ He focuses in on Lawliet instead, who looks… _distant_. Lawliet doesn’t keep secrets from him, not purposely. _Or he didn’t used to._ B’s mind clamours greedily for knowledge _of_ _all of him_ , but he keeps his voice gentle as he stands next to him by the dawning morning.

“You have something you wanna say about her, too? I mean, fair’s fair.”

* * *

 

B’s warmth is pressing in on L like steam or vapor, not entirely unwelcome but a type of pressure, just the same. _Let me in_ , it pleads, and L almost wants to, if only to put an end to that lingering guilt in B’s voice.

He wants to, but he would have to be so careful. It has to have the right packaging, and bold lettering on the side: _FRAGILE._

L picks up the last wedge of chocolate and slips it into his mouth, letting it half-melt before he speaks again. “It’s like I told you when we were last in bed. A wasn’t really ‘right,’ as they say.” He weighs B down with his gaze for a moment before reaching out to put a hand on his waist, hauling him in a little closer. B may be a few inches taller but he looks younger than L feels, his eyes shimmering with a roil of troubled emotions. “That may have been an understatement,” L says against B’s shoulder, his other hand reaching up to tangle through the back of B’s hair. It feels like it needs washed, but it’s soft against his fingertips..

He takes in a deep breath.“And it couldn’t have been either of us. I’m not like A –” _No, you’re not, no,_ some tiny hidden voice echoes less certainly from where he can’t hear it “–And you’re _definitely_ not.” He inhales again into the fabric of B’s shirt, smelling the faint tang of his skin just beneath. “Trust me,” he adds, barely audible.

 _Because you’re far too human,_ he thinks. The most fascinatingly, terrifyingly _human_ of all the humans L has ever known. No wonder A had wanted to be him, being so far from it herself. Such a sad, cheap mimicry.

He has a death grip on B’s waist, and maybe it hurts now but B’s going to need it soon. Yes, if they keep talking about this, he’ll definitely need it.

* * *

 

B feels caught, knotted and noosed, all tangled up in Lawliet’s limbs. Part of him wants to just breathe out and say _I trust you_ , and maybe sleep on that. _But we were alike. She and I needed each other like you…never believed you need me._ Lawliet’s grip says otherwise, and though B feels a measure of anger at Lawliet’s insistence, he tries his best to let it go. _You’re here. We’ll sort this out._

“You’re wrong,” he says it carefully into Lawliet’s shoulder, trying not to let the comparison feel personal, “But I thought that about her too, for a long time. Thought that all she ever was, was an A for Ambition. But it wasn’t like that. I don’t think she wanted to be alone. She’d listen to me, set me right when I’d go too far out of it. Hell, she’d even tell me about how you were, and it hurt her too. And I’d put her through that.”

B notices his voice has gotten a little frantic, almost angry. He takes a breath out of Lawliet’s touch for a moment, stuck between wanting more and feeling caught in a web that he can’t quite see just yet. Certainly there’s something behind Lawliet’s black eyes that makes him hesitate, but B was never great at _stopping_.

“I needed it, she was good at it, and she gave it without asking for too much back. But I couldn’t give that back to her. And she paid for it. She couldn’t survive alone either. So don’t say we weren’t alike, alright?”

 _It’s just not right. Everything I did to her._ B almost feels cheap, the small part of him that recognizes Lawliet wouldn’t even be here right now, had it not been for her death.

* * *

 

“B, stop.”

L gently steers him onto the bed for the second time that night, and B let’s himself be steered, his weight settling ghost-like onto the mattress.

 _I’m not going to let you idealize her in death,_ L thinks with a new grit of determination _. You might never let go._

He crouches down, grips B’s hand hard.

“After –” he swallows down too quick on the word. But it’s just a word, and it’s from the past. It doesn’t matter now. “After Lant Street, right? When things were going to shit for the two of us, I know you must’ve leaned on her. She probably offered her ear to you, didn’t she?” The flicker in B’s eye all but confirms it. “She made an offer to me, too. And it wasn’t her ear.”

A knew that L didn’t want to talk. That he was sick and tired ( _exhausted_ ) of B trying to make him.

“She said I should…try her. That maybe it would help.” He looks at one specific unraveled thread on the bedspread as he speaks. “I don’t know if she thought it was because she was a girl or just…different. It was oddly impersonal, like she was suggesting I borrow her car.” Finally, he lifts his eyes to B, who’s as silent and still as marble.

“I told her no.” He doesn’t look away, because if L can’t do it without looking, then he won’t do it at all.

“Until you left, I told her no.”

* * *

 

There’s nothing but a slow roar in B’s ears, images of A turning inside out to blood and bones and _rot_ . The memories assault him, from their initial vehement dislike to the slow way she force-fed him respect, to the way their friendship started, after that _case_ when he couldn’t do anything right by Lawliet. She’d smile gently in a way he wanted to believe in, listen to him swear and even cry. He would never have trusted her in Mexico if it weren’t for that, and the entire time?

 _She knew. She knew where I was and made me trust her, played fucking games with me when Lawliet was–_ there’s suddenly not enough air to breathe in the tiny room, he tears himself off the bed, grounds his hands on the wall next to the window. Trying to breathe out the truth of the night. _Oh god._

B sees his own reflection in the glass as a car flashes by, mouth drawn white-thin, the memories playing like a cheap reel in front of his eyes. _Don’t play games with me,_ and she _grins_ in his memory, _laughs and laughs_ , he sees her eyes glitter next to him for a fleeting moment, and he punches straight through to the wall, even though he knows she isn’t there. The sound isn’t as satisfying as he wants it to be, but the drywall is cheap, crumbles straight through to the concrete behind it. “ _Fuck.”_

His knuckles throb, at least.

“This is just it, isn’t it? It’s everything I fucking thought she was, and she fooled me? The whole time she was just playing with my head, just like always, to get to you in some way or other so that she could stay on top. I can’t fucking believe I let her–”

His eyes wander back to Lawliet on the bed, all tension and edges. Lawliet’s gaze is searching at his, and there’s fear in it, like he’s afraid B might be angry at him. _She fucking did this too. All of it._ B strides back, straddles himself right in Lawliet’s lap, fingertips settling on Lawliet’s chin even as his fingers start to bruise.

When he kisses Lawliet, it’s not kind. But it’s like breathing for the first time since the conversation began, and B bites it, _demands it,_ pulls away too soon.

“Don’t think I’m angry at you,” he gasps a little at the tightness of Lawliet’s grip on his thighs, “You’re mine, and she couldn’t fucking stand that, so she drove us apart. But not anymore.  That would be fucking _letting her win.”_

* * *

 

_“You’re mine…”_

The words are swept away by a flurry of bruising kisses, B’s hands snagging through L’s hair painfully, a cacophony of demands issued by teeth and tongue and fingers.

_Fuck the pain away._

L knows that place all too well. His initial, instinctual alarm at being accosted so suddenly fades as his body responds to the scent of B’s hot breath, the weight of his pelvis, grinding against L’s. He slides his hands up B’s thighs and plants them on his hips, pushing his own feet against the ground hard so that he has the momentum to lift B up and flip him onto the bed, where he lands with a slight bounce and gazes up at L in wordless desperation.

“Take everything off.” L says quietly, lifting away his own tee-shirt and letting it drop to the ground. _This is only going to help for a little while,_ he thinks, but if it’s the only way to help then he’ll do it. And desire is running thick in his blood by now, anyway, his cock standing rigid when he lowers his jeans.

B scrambles out of his own clothes, lithe as a creature who never needed them at all, and comes to all fours on the bed, opening his mouth with a hunger that L fills, cock thrusting deep into the back of his throat. Both hands gripping the side of B’s face, he fucks his mouth for a while like that, groaning from deep in his chest at how _good_ it feels, and how _amazing_ B looks with tears running out of his eyes and slobber dripping down his chin, his one free hand frantically stroking his own length.

Everything about B’s mouth is delicious warmth and insidious pressure, and after a while L has to pull himself out before his loses it, taking only a few seconds to collect his breath before he pushes B back onto the sheets and crawls over him, their white bodies overlapping, blurring together. His hand finds B’s chin, cups it.

“Remember what I told you in Vegas…you’re my first in everything,” he says, and it would almost be sweet, maybe, if his sharp nails weren’t tracing B’s lips. If he wasn’t smiling his most terrible smile.

* * *

 

“You’re my _everything,”_ he growls back, drinking in Lawliet’s words though he full knows not to trust what’s said between the sheets. Lawliet always made it seem more real.

_God knows I need something real right now._

It feels like a violation, like fucking on a _grave,_ and for a moment B sees the image of A standing by the edge of the bed, lips bloody with a carnal smile, and B sinks his teeth into Lawliet’s shoulder, _marking him_ even as Lawliet shoves him back to the mattress with a wicked smile.

Lawliet scoops up B’s legs so that they’re straddling his shoulders, gusting his breath over B’s straining erection. _Oh god yes._ B needs to stop thinking right now, stop seeing _anything_ , and his vision flickers black when Lawliet engulfs his cock. It’s almost enough, the sweet drag of teeth and the _heat_ at the back of Lawliet’s throat.

 _But not quite_.

“Hit me.” he gasps, and Lawliet pulls off, hesitating a moment, “What, are you going to make me beg?”

 _CRACK!_ Lawliet’s hand leaves a stinging mark just below his ass, shoving the breath from his throat. “Again.”

 _CRACK!_ B hopes it bruises, hopes it _scars_ almost _,_ pushing his thighs back against sharp collarbones. _You’re here, you’re here because you_ need _this, because I need this, and what happened with her was_ nothing. CRACK! He gasps into Lawliet’s lips, nails, almost losing himself in the sensation of it.

He tugs on Lawliet’s hair, whining slightly even as Lawliet’s tongue slides off  the tip of him,“I need you to fuck me. Please.”

* * *

 

The combination of gulping on B’s cock and roughly slapping the back of his upper thighs leaves L feeling like his brain is too big for his skull, white noise fuzzing behind his eyes and journeying down to his fingertips, vaguely numb now.

_“I need you to fuck me. Please.”_

L gives B’s shaft, damp with his own spit, a series of slow pulse-squeezes, allowing his heart a moment to catch up with his breath before he ducks out from beneath B’s legs and gets everything he needs from nightstand near the bed.

Spread out before him, everything about B is whole and beautiful on the surface, from the dark flush of his lips to the wet beads glistening at the end of his cock. But L can see all the cracks and fissures shifting beneath B’s skin, and intimidation grips at him briefly – _do you have to be so sure I can fix you? –_ before he bats it away. Lets the moment sweep him up again.

L licks a path up the inside of B’s thigh, lightly palming his length as he nudges his legs open wider. B’s desire to be taken, to be utterly lost in physical sensation, is like an open vacuum pulling L in, all his carefully executed thoughts wiped out by pure intuition, his tongue probing inside B lightly at first, then with thrusts that become more assured with each desperate cry that falls from B’s lips. The more L uses his mouth, the more B’s hips jerk erratically, balls drawing tight under L’s hand like he might come from just this.

B moans in disappointment when he lifts his head up, so L quickly works his fingers inside, flexing and curling them in a way that rips another cry from B’s lungs. “You need me to fuck you here?” he asks with a casualness that breaks ragged on the last syllable, and B nods once, quick and desperate.

Lube and condom, quick, and then L’s pressing himself into B’s ass, watching closely as sweet relief shudders over his features. The sight of it makes L let out a long groan against B’s knee, hooked over his shoulder, before he moves and rotates his hips, rocking into B in slow circles that he gradually builds to a faster pace.

“I’m the only one who’s fucked you that matters,” he utters as he delivers slow, nearly tender strokes to B’s cock, a contrast to the rough rhythm of their fucking. The words aren’t planned, but maybe that’s what makes them true. L speaks truth best like this, anyway.

* * *

 

Part of B almost falters at Lawliet’s insistence, feeling the marks left by other fingers, painted red and dirty with nicotine, stranger’s fingers, allies, all of them. The marks though not as deep, still flicker on the surface of his skin. Lawliet’s fingers skate over his chest even as he delivers a punishing roll of the hips, tearing a gasp from B’s throat.

 _But it’s true, isn’t it?_ Lawliet’s cock is buried so deep inside him it feels like the _core_ of his being, every raw thrust coiling the heat inside him _deeper, tighter, more,_ the sweat on his thighs melting the flesh beneath it. He bridges his hips to get _deeper,_ feeling the desperate way Lawliet grips at his thighs and gasps out what could be his name.

The hesitation is gone as it if had _never_ existed.

“Yes, _yes_ , oh God, yes –” a rough thrust hits his prostate and he’s screaming, “ _Lawliet_ “ the name slips from his lips before he has a chance to think about it, never mind caution, he’s spilling it all into Lawliet’s clenched hand, fire roaring from his stomach to his toes. When he forces his eyes open, Lawliet is thrusting and keening a moment later, mouth raw and gaping, eyes taking in all of it but seeing _nothing._

They both remain entangled, breathing in the sweat and smell of each other, thoughts not yet rearing their ugly whispers to the surface. Suddenly Lawliet is kissing him, slowly, insistently, and B feels an axis shift in his core being, compass rose splitting into a perfect _L._

“You really are though. The only person that’s real to me, Lawliet.” he drops his hand to Lawliet’s ribcage _don’t go stay just as you are never try to run never hide._

 _It’s alright. He’s nothing like her_ . And B almost sobs, but it morphs into a laugh, even as _those_ memories come flooding back again. Red lipstick and staged squeeze of breast, cheap desperate fingers and tongues by the roadside. _Fucker_. Lawliet meets his eyes with concern and B realizes his laugh may be a little manic. He catches his breath.

“It’s nothing, it’s just. Even after all she did, she was shit in bed, really.” his gut clenches as the image of A’s hands  roaming over L’s body kills the laughter in his throat. _It’s okay. He’s here. She can’t take him._ He grips Lawliet’s wrist, but not too tightly, kisses it gently, “At least for me. Not like you at all.”

* * *

 

L drapes his arm across his midsection, fingertips slotted between B’s, the pleasant haze of release still tingling over his sweat-streaked skin.

_“…She was shit in bed, really. At least for me. Not like you at all.”_

The words vibrate against L’s wrist in a kiss, B’s eyes somehow shy beneath his dark, very long lashes. Gushing and earnest words of devotion from B were a regular occurrence, once upon a time, back when they’d just been best friends. And even though he’d only been ten or eleven, L feels like he been better at accepting it, then, better at giving B whatever reassurances he was so desperately in need of.

And then he got old and forgot.

“Yeah, it wasn’t so memorable with her,” he says faintly, though he wonders now if A somehow knew that he didn’t want it to be memorable. No memories, no attachments, just a brief stretch of respite. _Maybe you did give us what we both needed_ , he thinks, though he doesn’t dare say it out loud, not when the truth is still making B laugh that strange, haunted laugh.

“She was an empty space that filled other empty spaces.” There it is again. It’s not a particularly kind observation, but it feels true.

* * *

 

“She was full of shit.” B says bluntly, though there’s a part of him that knows Lawliet’s words hold more weight, the bitter venom of the thought of A even going _near_ Lawliet after Lant street makes him want to vomit, “But she had her secrets.”

He peels himself off of Lawliet’s body half-reluctantly, but his mind is thrumming with frenetic energy, thoughts beginning to bounce around with what he now knows about what A was. _I’m not stopping here._ _Not stopping till I know every goddamn thing she ever tried to keep from us, or hurt us with._

“You think she’s not playing games with us again? One last time?“ he picks up a page, eyeing Lawliet’s terse notes. Clenches his fist. S _he knew we wouldn’t be able to walk away from this, even now. Well. Let’s get this over with_. "Show me what you’ve been up to while I was gone. We’ll finish this, even though it was what she fucking wanted.”

 _God knows we can’t stop now that we’ve started._ He gnaws at his knuckles nervously, picking up a pen and thinking of Mello.

 

_ _

_B for Betrayal_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

 

Still naked, still too warm for clothes, L takes the seat opposite B and tents his fingers over his notes. “I was trying to make a list of all the times I could remember A being in Russia, see if any pattern emerged. She was born here but she also made sure that she died here – and she never mentioned any zombies to me.”

He picks up a pen and clicks it a few times. “Let’s finish it fast, then,” he finally says. “Why don’t you sleep a while? I’ll go out for some food and pick you up more cigarettes.”

B only reluctantly agrees, his whole demeanor still tense and flared up, but when L returns from his errands B is finally collapsed on one of the beds, thick in the grip of sleep. L eats a bit of food, makes some phone calls, and tries to nap, but daylight has made the room unbearably hot and energy is still crawling under his skin like an army of fire ants. He chews an Adderall to hold him over, and makes a mental note to convince B that they ought to switch to a hotel with real air conditioning and bigger beds.

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed this update - more to come soon! :)


	5. June 4, 1998

**June 4, 1998, 7:10 am**

Mello wanders past the Administrative Building, the address clutched firm in his hand. In the other is a cut out of a tourist map, just in case. He knows the city well, but the sun’s only just beginning to rise and he wants to make sure he gets there and back quick. Light enough to be safe, dark enough for everyone to stay in bed. Only nightshift workers heading home with bleary eyes litter the streets.

On the ground, he finds a rusted paperclip, and an old scratch ticket.

He can stop and get breakfast somewhere on the way back. It’s cheap, he has more than enough to last him for a few weeks in his pockets, and Peter’s job is lined up for him from now on. Drug running’s messy, but he’s seen it enough times. And his friends always make it look damned easy enough. If anything, he’ll survive. That’s the end goal, anyway.

The complex is empty, quiet, a trashed apartment building next to a cemetery that has grass soaked with dew and a few withering flowers scattered around the graves. Bodies buried, mourned, and forgotten.

Mello says a prayer, and fumbles with his rosary. He pretends that one of the bodies, buried in the Earth, is familiar. Everything smells musty, like death.

The door is locked. He can kick it open, probably, but that’s too obvious. Not that it’d matter too much—the place wasn’t exactly impressive on the outside.

Mello bends apart the paperclip he found on the ground, and jams it into the lock. The tumbler slips, and he swears under his breath, fumbling with the tiny piece of steel until he pushes the pins just right, and the knob turns.

The apartment is dusty. Not too full, not too empty. A simple place with just enough to get by. It’s ugly. Lonely. Mello can’t even begin to imagine how long its been since someone last lived here. His fingers run over old books and dusty furniture while his feet scuff the floor. Separate, tucked away in a drawer filled with half used pens and crumbled up pieces of paper, all but thrown out and forgotten, is a beat up excuse for a book. Mello’s drawn to it, because it’s similar to his journal.

For a moment, he feels like it’s invasive. Then, he remembers that she’s dead. In heaven, she’s probably scowling down at him, but he decides he can deal with that when he’s dead, too. He flips it open, fingers ghosting over torn pages, half finished entries, and sloppy writing. It’s in English, written so hastily that his eyes have trouble processing the words.

Mello glances at the window. He has time.

_A’s Diary, 1 [do not edit or repost]_

 

He flips through the pages, scanning through each one, until he comes to a halt in the middle of the diary.

_Heard #17 call him PETER._

Peter, circled.

_Pretty sure he’s going to be taken._

His pulse flares, and in a moment he’s burning up, his throat closing while his eyes dart around the page. He tries to read, but it’s too messy and his mind is moving too fast. Mello snaps the diary shut.

It can’t be the same person, but it’s too familiar not to be. The words don’t add up, because that’s not how it ended. It wasn’t murder, it wasn’t foul play. It was just a fuck up. Too much, and Peter ate it like every other sorry son of a bitch that took to the streets.

Still, Mello shoves the diary into his pocket, and gets the hell out of there. There’s no reason to take it, outside of the wave of nostalgia and the nauseating similarity that crawls through his gut and up into his throat. On the street, streaks of sun stain the horizon, and Mello slips out the door, doing his best to leave it as it was.

Passersby pay Mello no mind. In his hands, he turns the scratch ticket over and over in his palms, fingers running over the silver numbers. He rips off the scratched portion, and shoves it back into his pocket, throwing the remnants to the street.

* * *

**June 4, 1998 [2:37pm]**

Breakfast comes and goes. Mello sits in the back of a cheap looking diner, and twirls oatmeal around in his bowl. It’s thick, sticky, and covered in too much honey and cinnamon. Eating it in huge, warm bites, he swings his legs under the chair. They hover just above the floor, and he wonders what it’ll be like to grow tall enough to touch the ground.

In the bathroom mirror, his skin looks clean, but his eyes still have that same, pale, nasty look to them. Peter said he looked like he could give someone a good whack if he really tried. His last adoptive family just said he looked disturbed.

In the afternoon, he trudges across the city to get his work done. Peter used to get stuff right from the guys that made it. That meant more profit, and less chance of getting stabbed in the back.

It’s more a shack than a house. But it’s still standing, so Mello doesn’t pay it too much mind. Even outside, it fucking reeks. The pungent familiarity of iodine hits his nose as he trudges inside. Batteries, gasoline, and shit tons of match boxes are the first thing he sets eyes on.

God, it stinks.

Peter told him to drop it if something happened to him. They both knew, before he died, that it was wishful thinking. He’d talked to one of the middlemen that spends his days parked outside the bakery, and had the job set up for himself.

Mello rolls a vial around in his palm. It’s cheaper than heroin, the cook tells him, but it’s got ten times the kick. Corroded batteries scatter themselves across the floor while fresh packs sit across from him. They must go in this shit. That, and the gasoline. Mello thinks of what it must be like, to put this inside of himself. At the thought, he shuts his eyes so he doesn’t shiver. Definitely not heroin.

 _What is it, then_?

Mello can’t ask questions here. He turns the vial over and over again between his fingers, and holds it close to his face. The woman across the room is ripping the strikers off of match boxes and soaking them in big pots of water. She hardly looks alive, with her trembling hands and thin cheekbones.

Mello doesn’t understand what she’s doing. What he does understand, though, is that this shit is deadly.

_If she can survive, so can I._

“You’ll get ten percent,” she tells him, and that’s fine. The same Peter got, so at least she’s not trying to screw him. Must’ve known they worked together–everyone did. Ten percent, on a good day, could be enough for a few meals.

“Sure.”

Her husband has the addresses. Sometimes, they sell it on the street, sometimes, there are orders. Tourists aren’t as fond of this shit, so this time, it’s an order. Doesn’t make a difference to Mello, as long as he gets paid. She calls him in from the back, and he comes trudging out. He grumbles, but it’s fine because he wants another fix anyway.

He peeks his head in from the back door, and slips inside.

Mello’s heart stops, and he can nearly _feel_ his hands go clammy.

Her husband’s arm is completely rotted away. His forearm hangs limp, muscles completely deteriorated. Gangrene flesh sits around the wound—if Mello can even call it that—and it’s green, covered in pus, the red of flesh sticking out with yellow bone peeking through.

Iodine.

It smells like decay.

For a split second, he just stares, wide eyed and stupid. He knows he should look away, but his brain’s still processing, while his stomach sinks. Children, a woman once tutted to him in the library–are no good at adverting their gaze. Curiosity’s a killer.

 _Jesus fucking Christ_.

Mello’s scream catches in his throat, and he’s pedaling backwards, nearly tripping over his own feet and abandoning the vials on the table. That man’s half dead, and he’s walking around like nothing’s out of the ordinary.

It’s grotesque.

_Oh my God oh my God_

_Save me Jesus Christ I’m so sorry forgive me help me_

_Hail Mary, full of…full of…_ God _damn it_  he can’t remember.

Neither of them can get a word out before he sprints.

He bolts past the bakery, through the crowded streets full of rush hour workers trying to get their day started, his heart pounding in his chest and air seeping into his mouth, though he can’t even feel it. His legs shake, because he’s fucking terrified. The oxygen doesn’t go to his brain quite right, and his head is spinning.

He gets a whiff of gasoline from a passing truck. In a back alley, he vomits up water and bile.

Mello starts wailing, rubbing at his eyes and then curling his arms around himself. Gross. Gross, gross, gross, _gross_. Clammy hands fumble for his rosary, but Mello has no recollection of his prayers. With the sounds of the city overwhelming and nauseating around him, he’s petrified.

He wails, and no one is around to hear him.

He wants to leave. His legs tell him to bolt back to that stupid fucking hotel and _beg_ Rue to take him to Winchester. Mello whips himself around, and the alleyways, all of the streets he ran down, they’re all familiar. But now, everything sits the wrong way.

All he can fucking smell is gasoline and iodine.

Decay.

 _Breathe. Breathe, come on_.

Mello sucks in a shaky breath, and holds it. The world is silent.

The memory of rotted flesh and yellowing bone comes back, and everything comes crashing down. He sinks to the ground, and buries his face in his knees.

* * *

 

**June 4, 1998 [7:12pm]**

Come sunset, they’ve had a real dinner and are walking along the embankment in front of the Winter Palace, the blue and gold exterior almost too gaudy to be beautiful, too false.

“What do you think?” L asks, squinting at B through a haze of cigarette smoke. “Head out now or wait for full dark?

“Let’s get it done now. Night might give us better cover, but we might run into trouble.” the smoke is barely helping him keep calm. The smiling posters in the district keep flickering to red lips, hearing laughter in the distant murmur of the Neva river. A sleep painted with similar horrors, zombies that he’s probably going to see again and _again_ before this case is closed. B refuses to let up, the anger still white hot in his throat.

_I’m not letting her stop me, either._

They take the bike down to the cemetery, dressed in yet grimier clothing to blend in. In the half-light, the apartment building looks almost pitiful, rather than imposing. It’s quiet, for the moment.  B follows behind a slouching young man after he unlocks the lobby. No one bats an eye at them.

It’s not like there are many to look anyways. B would bet on at least half of them being squatters. They round the dirty hallway that stinks of piss to A’s first floor apartment. B examines the brass doorknob.

“Lock was already picked. Pretty amateurish. Looks like an addict or some-odd.” _Someone might have gotten here before we did._ He opens the door carefully, both of them steering clear of what could be a line of fire.

“Hey!”

He and Lawliet both flinch as stout woman with filmy red in her eyes stumbles out from the room next to A’s, “You friends of that no-good bitch?”

“What did you say?” B spits as she weaves closer to them, clearly messed out of her mind. B’s having trouble focusing on her dirty black hair.

“D’you know that bitch—she never lent me any fucking cigarettes—“ the woman’s voice is choked at the throat when B slams her against the wall. Her face flickers between A’s knowing smirk and the bleary-eyed terror. He breaks her nose, just to see the blood cascade in the right places over the image.

“Did you know her?” he demands it softly, pressing a little harder on her windpipe, enjoying the way it turns a little blue, “Why was she here?”

* * *

 

L reels into the door frame, because it feels like if he got too close that B might hit him next, lashing out at what ever horrors are dancing behind his eyes. He’s fixed the woman with a cold, empty smile that makes her whimper in the hard clutch of his hand, tears rising up in her eyes, then spilling down her cheeks to mix with the blood there.

When B is scarred, he scars back, and L’s breath runs cold in wonder at how many people were scarred in those years they spent apart.

 _The divorce_ – that’s what Wedy had called it, laughing through a mouthful of smoke and taping her long nails against a glass of gin, poured over a single ice cube. Wedy was good for that, good for turning all serious matters into something silly and stupid.

“Rue, she doesn’t know anything,” he manages, an unspoken _A wouldn’t have revealed a thing_ at the back of his tongue. B tilts his head just slightly at the sound of L’s voice, then finally drops his hand and the woman collapses to her knees, gasping in pain and fear.

“Stay out of our way,” L says softly, and she starts to crawls back to her own front door.

* * *

 

It’s the slight fear in Lawliet’s voice that forces him to stand down.

B loosens his fingers reluctantly, Lawliet’s voice dragging him out of the colors and memories, but not taking the edge off the _anger._

 _Been a while since I’d checked myself for a case_. God knows, the people he usually works with don’t give a damn whose nose he breaks in the process. And it flares the wounds at the gut of him, leaving A’s image sharper than ever in front of him, spiders crawling from her ears.

 _Careful, little bird._ The apparition mouths, then laughs blood still staining her face. B wipes the blood from his knuckles onto his jeans and slips into the apartment without looking at Lawliet. The apartment is dank, musty. _She was definitely trying to blend in here_. There’s even a spoon and a candle tucked in to the bookshelf, stained sheets rumpled on the mattress on the floor.

_If addicts broke in, wouldn’t they have taken the candle?_

B’s eyes latch on the the uneven dust patterns on the desk, small fingerprints. He opens the drawer, noting the outline in the dust of what could have been a small notebook. _Fuck._ He shoves it closed with a little too much force, splintering the handle.

“There was something we were supposed to find here. But someone got here before us. Maybe the police,” A’s ghost laughs at him _again_ , and he grits his teeth, “But she would have been too smart for that. D’you think the police set those sensors in, or someone higher up than them?”

Lawliet is gazing intently out the cracked window at the wall of the adjacent building, looking for all like he’s seen the ghost that giggles at B from the half-caved in loveseat. “You see something?”

* * *

The room feels both barely lived in and _too_ lived in, and L can see that at least one or two living ghosts have passed through here since A last inhabited the space – and recently, at that, tainting the evidence, or stealing what little of worth they might have found.

The almost-broken window is covered in layers of faded newsprint, a few strategic strips torn for look-out holes. L tugs at the paper and rips a large chunk of it away, staring out into the darkness. The block-style building across the way is nearly identical to this one, four stories tall, the apartment windows filled with junk and hanging laundry. Candles burning like hope in just a scant few.

The rear of the building, with its single back exit, is an expanse of dirty, graffiti-adorned brick. Some of it stands out as different from the rest, though. Triggers a memory.

_In the car leaving the Manan Airport in Yakutsk. I was driving, Watari and two SIS agents as passengers (Benji, that second stand-in for L). Warehouse by the Lena River, a pattern. Six lines one on top the other, the first two lines broken. Benji said he’d seen something like it in Moscow. Now here, too._

Six lines, the first, fourth, and sixth incomplete. L feels like he knows what it means, but the answer isn’t quite coming to the surface.

_“You see something?”_

L beckons B over, points his finger through the glass at the graffiti.

“See those lines? Have you seen any patterns like that before?”

* * *

“Trees in the graveyard where I found the body had ‘em.” The red brick of the building seems a little too vivid, a little too bloody. He turns to the corner to glance at A– but she’s gone, for now.

L glances to the desk doubtfully. “Show me.”

B nods once, kicking the door of A’s shithole closed as they take to the hallway. _Was this what you wanted us to find? Something that Lawliet would know, but not me? Was this your way of telling me the two of you knew things that I didn’t?_

B wants to catch Lawliet’s hand, but he’s afraid of squeezing it too tightly, carpals splintering gently under his grip. B almost shudders, keeps on ahead into the darkening evening. He glances upwards as a shadow seems to pass over them. Above is the creature-who-is-not-quite-A, who had waved from the graveyard. Its wings are an ethereal grey, and its hair is tied into sharp knots, like a poorly done braid. He forces his eyes downwards, fingers twitching for a knife. He digs his nails into his palm, but he can still see the apparition, banking its wings to rest in the graveyard once more.

_Not sure who’s worse, A; you, or your monster._

The lines on the trees are more desperate than the even edges of the scrawl on the building, but it’s recognizable. B points to the broad maackia with blood still crusted on the bark. No police tape, nothing, “There’s where the corpse was.”

* * *

B is still tightly-wound, his frenetic energy almost visible, like radiating smoke, head darting around as if ducking demons. In contrast, L forces himself into a focused calm, even as his heart races and a thin trail of sweat snakes down his spine. He trains his penlight on the tree carvings, taking a few photographs with his Minox, then crouches down to scrape some dried blood into a scrap of foil, folding and tucking it into his pocket.

“Worth saving it off for analysis,” he says, coming back up to his feet.

He runs his fingers over the six lines carved into bark. “I saw six lines like this on a building in Yakutsk, a city to the South of that compound where I tried to extract A with M16,” he explains, catching B’s eye. “That place where she took out an assassin ring.”

The top two lines are unfinished, but it isn’t an accident, it’s part of the pattern. Lines broken and unbroken. A code or communcation? Likely. But what kind?

“I heard reports of the same imagery in Moscow, too,” he adds.

Conincidence is a possibillity too, of course, but L isn’t in the habit of writing off coincedence. Not without investigating, first.

“Let’s take the long way back to the hotel.” L starts off in the direction of their waiting bike. “Maybe we’ll see the pattern spray-painted somewhere else along the way.”

* * *

The bike hits the dirt with a roar, and B drives like his demons are chasing up the tailpipe. _Suppose they might as well be_. But Lawliet’s arms are tight to bruising around his ribcage as he takes the narrow street corners at a drift, and that’s something. B wills it into being enough.

For now.

They catch another of the line-symbols, tucked in an alleyway, which Lawliet photographs, finger tucked to his lips. He looks bizarre and beautiful that way, like always, and B focuses on committing those small details to memory, trying to force uglier memories out.

Lawliet is quiet and centered as he climbs back on to the bike, but the tension is all knotted up in the hunch of his spine. His heartbeat feels too strong against B’s, like Vegas all over again. It’s reassuring at terrifying at once.

“Can we sleep after this?” _Can we?_ It’s an honest question, but they can try.

“Okay.” Lawliet barely whispers the word in his ear, and B revs the bike back to the hotel.

B nibbles at the coppery tang of his knuckles as they approach on foot, knowing well that they won’t be spending the night here. Time to change streets again, keep on the move. He rakes his eyes over the front stoop, but there’s no sign of the blue-eyed street urchin with the fire in his gaze. _Guess that’s it then._

B sighs gently, turns back to Lawliet, “Guess I was hoping Mello might be back.”

* * *

Mello wanders, kicking at the street with his scuffed up boots and grinding his feet against stones that feel all too similar to bone beneath his feet. All he can fucking think about. His nails, bitten down to the roots, sting every time he scratches at his forearms—a constant reminder that yes, okay, yes, his flesh is still in tact.

In his hand, the diary sits like a weight–heavy, prickling against his fingertips with venomous mockery that runs white hot anger through his veins. He pops his jaw in and out of place so many times that it begins to throb, dull, aching, consistent in his ears. It sinks in, finally, that this girl is heavily linked to Peter’s work. That much, he figures out by flipping through the diary over and over again.

Hopefully she rotted real fuckin’ good by the time anyone found her.

He tries to keep still, but that lasts for only so long. His legs bring him around the complex at least a dozen times before he tucks himself into a nearby alley, one leg curled up to his chest. It feels like hours that Mello keeps himself awake, the churning thought of rotted flesh and the acidic taste of iniquity on the back of his tongue. It’s when he starts to chew at his nails again that he sees two familiar tufts of messy black hair and crooked posture.

Mello’s stomach drops so quickly that he thinks he might vomit.

They’re tense, walking side by side in near silence.

The wonder he’d felt before is replaced with a nauseating disgust. Death lingers in his nose and on the tip of his tongue, bitter and chalky no matter how many times he swallows it away.

They’d told him they weren’t kind, but this isn’t exactly what the fuck he’d had in mind.  Tears sting, warm and blurry over his vision, and he blinks them away as quickly as they come. It’s anger. All fucking anger that leaves him with wide eyes and stinging red.

He kicks himself up, and follows.

Mello doesn’t think about what the fuck he’s doing—and certainly not about the fact that Rue towers over Mello. His fingers curl into the hem of Rue’s jacket, and tug.

His mouth moves, and the words don’t come out. He feels incompetent, until they force themselves out, shaking and seething. “She couldn’t just leave us the fuck _alone_!” Mello spits, his English fading back into icy Russian.

God, he can’t even think straight. He knows it must sound like nonsense, but his mouth is moving faster than his head can process, trying to settle into the comforting release of _blame_ . His fist clenches, itching to swing while the memory of how good it feels to just fucking _hit something_ burns through his gut. “I have _nothing_ . I had next to nothing and she still fucking _took that away_!” In his other hand, he waves that God damn diary around, clenched so hard between his fingers that his knuckles shake white.

Fuck it.

Mello doesn’t know what the hell he’ll accomplish, but he takes the swing.

* * *

 _“She couldn’t just leave us the fuck_ alone! _”_ B turns to almost smile at Mello, but the kid’s spitting fire in a way that B knows all too well. His eyes are red from crying, too. _What’s the matter with you, kid?_

“ _I have_ nothing _. I had next to nothing and she still fucking took that away._ ”

B catches Mello’s tiny fist before it connects to his gut, confused for a moment, then reacting as Mello slaps a paper and leather object against his face, clawing his fingers across B’s cheek to scratch at his eyes with useless, bitten fingernails. B pushes back, almost laughing despite himself.

 _Kid’s got guts._ Then he catches sight of what’s in Mello’s hand.

 _The book._ It’s the same shape and size as the dust pattern in the drawer. The thought costs him a resounding kick to the shin. _Fuck, alright, let’s get this done_. He swerves round Mello’s second punch with the speed that usually serves him well, clamping his arms around arms at the elbows, and lifting him off the ground with ease. The kid kicks and flails, trying to bite, but B just reaches the arm that’s not focused on pinning him, places a thumbnail next to his eye. The boy goes still.

“ _Relax_ . You’re not the only one who knows to go for the eyes. I don’t know what you’re mad at A for, but let me tell you, I am fucking _pissed_ at her like you wouldn’t believe. So let up, okay? We’re on the same side.” B nods once at Lawliet, who tugs the notebook out of Mello’s hand.

* * *

L ducks well out of Mello’s range, but it seems that he’s decided to target his wrath at B, who handily neutralizes the boy but fails to put out the fire still blazing in his eyes.

“Not here,” L says in a low voice, dangling the notebook between his thumb and forefinger. He jerks his head toward the hotel entrance and B falls into line, his hands loosely gripped on Mello’s shoulders as he guides him through the door.

In the elevator, L’s eyes never leave Mello’s face, still livid with barely suppressed fury. “You wrote down the address before you left us?” he guesses, and Mello doesn’t quite nod, but clenches his jaw in a way that seems like an admission. “Our friend did a lot of bad things,” L admits, turning his face away from B’s slight flinch. “Some of them we know about, but what she did to you isn’t one of them.”

Back in their room, Mello sits at the end of the bed, eyes to the ground and hands fisted into the blankets. L pulls up a chair and perches on the end of it, B hovering over his shoulder as he cracks open the notebook. An unpleasant, moldy odor wafts up from the pages, and as L flips through them he frowns, wondering for a moment how this book could have possibly belonged to A. There are cigarette burns and even some blood stains – that’s not so much of a surprise, maybe, but the writing itself is chaotic and rambling, and L remembers her written words as precise and lethal, much like herself.

“Some of the notes are from last year, and even further back. Others are more recent,” L observes slowly, still not quite understanding what he’s looking at, so he passes the book over to Mello, calm as can be. “Show me what parts have you so angry, and tell us why.”

* * *

Mello takes the book, and keeps his eyes glued to it. He can’t look up at either of them. Not quite embarrassed, but still overly aware of the sensation of Rue’s thumbnail digging into the hard line of his eye socket. Flipping through, he’s memorized by now exactly where the passages are. The writing’s sloppy, and this bitch, he decides, was fucking deranged. Anger flies from explosive to compressed, gnawing at the inside of his chest with jolting stabs through his heart.

It’s hard to breathe, with his pulse slamming in his ears. It takes a few tries, his fingers fumbling with the pages, for him to get to the right one.

Mello smooths his hands across the entry, and turns it back to Lev. Hands dart back to the bedding once he takes it, curling his fingers until the wicks of his nails sting from the pressure. “Peter and I were really close.” For a while, his voice is lost, leaving him mouthing for something that’s just out of reach. Closer than family. Who the fuck is he kidding? Peter’d been his lifeline. Essentially, his everything. _How rotted was he, when they found him_?

The two of them already knew Mello was in with drugs. Pickpocketing and reselling, at least. His toes curled in his boots. “He, well, we used to…” Mello mutters, and clears his throat. “We used to do running for a lady near us. She’d make this _shit_ , and Peter and I’d get part of the profit if we helped her out.” Fingers scratched at the inside of his arm. “Kinda like heroin, but not. Peter’d always keep some in exchange for part of his share.”

Nothing like heroin, really. Nearly wincing at the reminder of rotted flesh, he crinkles his eyes shut and takes a deep breath. Does something about the nerves, but nothing for his temper.

Mello hopes she died alone. And he hopes she went in a way that wouldn’t get her to heaven or an ounce of retribution. _That’d serve her fucking right_. He tries to focus more on talking than feeling.

“Someone found him dead almost a week ago. Underneath the city, from an overdose.” Mello doesn’t bother explaining the journal—if Lev could figure out how he’d gotten the book in the first place, it was a waste of breath. “She knew about it for so _long_ , and that stuff eats people from the inside out, and…and…” his words die again, and he’s glaring a hole into the ground. It’s sick, the whole fucking thing is just _sick_.

His jaw locks, unlocks. Finally, his eyes make his way back up to Lev’s face, and then, reluctantly, to Rue’s.

“If she didn’t give a fuck whether or not we were dead, she should’ve just left us alone.“

_A’s Diary, pg 2_ [do not edit or repost]

 

B’s eyes rake over the text, some of it recognizable as A’s neat, precise script. Others of it a completely foreign scrawl, though no doubt the same writer. _Shit, she was fucked up._ His glance lingers at the text on the first page ‘SAW B WIT A LITTLE GIRL NEAR CES me’. His stomach flips, knowing well that he and A hadn’t seen each other in Russia for years. _What was going on with you, A?_

“Is this what you meant by ‘not right’?” he gives Lawliet a wary look, turning the page. At the bottom, ‘ _Call Lars. MISS HIM.’_ is scrawled there, and bile rises in his throat again. _Look, she’s just another fucking case now._  

Thankfully, no laughter accompanies the thought.

“The woman you work for – when did you last see her?”

“Yesterday.”

“It’s not A, then. She’s been dead for almost a month,” B slides himself next to Lawliet on the bed, so that their thighs are touching,  “She was trying to find out who’s behind this. I’ve seen the people you’re talking about, the ones rotting from the inside out.. Whatever’s going on with these drugs has to stop. But it’s a little bigger than just arresting ‘em, because that’s what the police should be doing, and they aren’t. I’ve seen ‘em.”

He turns back to Lawliet, “She keeps mentioning this doc, huh? D’you know–” B freezes a moment, realizing that the charcoal on his sketchbook is now a crumbled mess on the floor. _They don’t have room or housekeeping service in a shithole like this._ His eyes travel up the wall, to a slight ridge near the ceiling that he hadn’t quite noticed before. He points a finger upwards, leans in to Lawliet’s ear, “That… wasn’t there before, was it?”

* * *

L follows the course of B’s finger, up the wall to where the trim reaches the ceiling. One section of it is bulged out slightly in a way that doesn’t look like ordinary warping.

_“That… wasn’t there before, was it?”_

“The chocolate?” L says in his ordinary tone of voice. “I bought it at the shop on the corner.”

A bug, then. L’s brain flips back over the last several days to pinpoint when it was most likely placed.

_The day we broke into A’s apartment. The nice apartment, with the secret safe and the secret book, and the conveniently place sensors._

_Sensors that hadn’t been looking for A, but for any of her associates, knowing we would lead them to…_

His eyes drop back down to the brittle, damaged diary, a cradle for the thoughts of a brittle, damaged girl. But she had been onto something, she had been close to piecing it together in her own head, anyway – but why had she stopped? Why had she killed herself, instead?

_Because what she found made her want to die?_

L hates this kind of case. Hates feeling like he’s being strung along, led by breadcrumbs, forced to see both coincidence and misfortune as things he must fashion into weapons of advantage. But he’ll do just that, if he must. He fishes a pen from his pocket and opens to one of the few clean pages in the diary, writing out in clean script and then showing it to both B and Mello:

_“Everything I’m going to say next will be a lie. Please play along.”_

“This code, B. Do you see? Remember it?” He taps a page at random, giving a slight nod to B’s expression of befuddlement. “If I decode it, it reads as follows: ‘It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.’ That’s a quote from Voltaire, I believe.”

 _Let’s see how familiar you were with A’s love of symbols and drama_ , he thinks bitterly, eyeing the bulge near the ceiling.

“You know what this must mean, don’t you?” he says, allowing excitement to swell his voice.

“A’s got to be alive.”

* * *

B’s heart flip-flops, but he keeps his confusion in the eyes, lets his voice believe Lawliet’s gambit, “Of course– and here, I think if we connect these entries, it forms a map. She’s going to meet us– if I’m reading this right– by the Catherine Hermitage, and this doctor is the key to all of it.”

Lawliet gives a quicksilver smile which reminds him a little too much of A for comfort. _What’s your game, Lawliet? We need to get to a safe place. Somewhere where we can really talk._

_Somewhere public will be our best bet._

_“_ She had the one type of ink that shows up under UV– let’s get out a moment, moon is full, see if we can see anything else. Sounds like she might have known too much.” He picks up the bar of chocolate, tugs on his coat, “You coming, Mello?”

B barely glances back to Mello’s nod. Out in front is a small park, crossed by many tourists, where the three of them arrange themselves on a bench that’s just in view of the hotel entrance lit by a solitary streetlamp. B reads the names of those who pass the grimy entrance furiously, looking for someone that A would have mentioned

“Sorry about that,” he leans in to Mello, passing him a square of the chocolate,  “The walls were bugged. Someone doesn’t want us to learn what A knew. Can you tell us anything else about Peter? About the people that make what you sell?”

* * *

Mello takes the chocolate, sucking on the corner of it as they walk. It’s bittersweet on his tongue—a luxury he’s not quite used to. His heart is in his throat at the mention of the dealers. Dealing H was one thing, or reselling unmarked little pills, but he’d walked into a whole different level of absolute _shit_. “Peter’d do a lot of stuff for trafficking rings and underground gangs. Lots of it he wouldn’t let me tag along for.” He furrows his brows hard, trying to pull any other information he can. “He’d always be real nice to me, but he was good at fighting. Really smart, really tough.” But Peter wasn’t the only one–there’d been a whole group of kids like him that’d ruled the streets.

Mello comes to the conclusion that, no matter which way he looks at it, he’s fucked. The fear that prickles in the back of his throat when he realizes, finally, that these guys aren’t fucking around, and that they’ve got someone serious on their tail.  It’s enough to make him want to bolt all over again. “The lady that hired us was always buying batteries. Batteries, gasoline, and iodine. You could always smell her house from down the street.” _What else, what else?_ And in a flash, he’s frustrated that he can’t think of more, and that Peter had shielded him from everything, because now he’s left without a fucking clue as to what he’s supposed to say.

Mello feels grotesquely young. Naive.

He’s scared out of his mind.

If he were to run, where would he go? Peter’s dead, and even _he_ is mentioned in the diary. Mello feels helpless, caught in a storm of events that he cannot, no matter how hard he tries, have control over. On the streets, it’s just waiting around until he ends up like Peter—dead, forgotten, and decaying far before anyone even finds him.

The mortality he feels is enough to make his knees want to buckle.

If he wants to live, he _has_ to stick with Rue and Lev. The chocolate is beginning to melt between his fingertips, sticky and sweet on his hands. He shoves the rest of the candy past his teeth. Mello glances back at the hotel. “Someone’s gotta pick that stuff up, right?” he asks, jamming his free hand into his pocket to make sure his journal is still there. This isn’t so much about trust as it is survival. “I can hang around here ‘till they show up,” Mello offers. “If someone’s following you, they’ll know what you look like, right? No one’ll pay attention to a homeless kid.”

* * *

L takes one look at Mello’s face, serious despite the small smear of chocolate at the corner of his mouth, and digs through the backpack he grabbed on their way out of the hotel. He pulls out a chocolate bar and carefully unpeels the outer paper wrapper, leaving the foil intact, and presses the paper to the concrete surface of the bench so that he can write on it.

“If you get in trouble, or you don’t hear from us again for some reason, call this number. They’ll ask you for the code I’m writing down, and then they’ll put you in touch with someone who can come get you, take you to England.” He finishes writing and re-wraps the chocolate bar, pressing the adhesive on the paper as best he can. “Make sure no one else gets their hands on this, either,” he says, passing the candy over. Mello takes it and nods solemnly.

“Another thing –” L through from the backpack again until he finds the extra Minox camera he typically packs in his luggage. “If you think you spot who planted the bugs, stay well away from them. But if you can manage it without being seen, get their photo with this. It’s small enough that you can hide it in the palm of your hand.”

After distributing the camera, he hesitates, well aware that Mello’s just a kid, that he probably hasn’t had any real firearms training. But all he’s ever had to defend himself with, as far as L can tell, is his wits, and at any moment that might not be enough.

So that’s why he ends up pulling out the Beretta Pico pocket pistol, anyway, after surveying the area and making sure that they’re more or less alone in the park.

“This is for last resorts only. Always retreat if you can.”

“Jesus, Lev,” B breathes, and L glances up at him, questioningly. “Not that it isn’t a good idea. It is.”

“Show him its features,” L says with a slight nod, flipping open his cellphone and dialing a number by heart. B bends over Mello’s shoulder and speaks in a low voice, handling the Beretta with care.

Wedy answers after two rings. “What do you need?” She never wastes time on chit-chat. L appreciates that about her.

“You in Saint Petersburg by morning.” He pauses, tugging lightly on his lower lip. “As Frasier.”

Wedy’s sigh is audible even over the bad connection. She and A hadn’t exactly been friends, but Wedy’s ability to impersonate A had come in handy more than once, so they learned to work together when they needed to.

“I’ll be there no later that nine,” she says, then hangs up. Wedy doesn’t waste time on goodbyes, either.

* * *

Mello expects the gun to sit heavy in his hand, but the thing can’t be more than a couple of kilos. So small that it almost looks like a toy, he has trouble grasping the idea that this thing is loaded. That these two are giving him the authority to kill.

He’d refuse it, because his hands are trembling while Rue runs through how the hell he’s supposed to do this. _I don’t have a choice,_ is what he realizes.

Mello knows, after his pathetic attempt to take a few swings at Rue that he can’t hold himself up in a fight. So, he turns the thing over a few times, and nods along with the instructions. No safety, but the firing pin won’t shift if he drops it. Mello’s head is swimming while he tries to retain everything.

He gets the concept of aiming—he’s not sure how, exactly, it’ll go in practice. _Guess I’ll find out when it happens._

Which, Mello also notes, he hopes doesn’t.

It isn’t even shooting someone. He can shove morality right out of the way to stay alive. It’s the thought of _missing_ . And what if someone shoots _back._

In an hour—two,maximum—they’ll meet back here. Assuming that Mello doesn’t have to make a run for it.

From the park bench, they split, and he goes back to the hotel. He walks, his head down while his fingers fumble to makes sure the camera’s flash is off.

What a way to get caught that’d be.

Mello blinks away sleep, painfully aware of how quiet the streets are. A few of the dull street lamps flicker on and off, lighting the streets in pale, ghostly yellow. It’s pitifully quiet, the kind of silence that makes loneliness sit heavy in the center of his chest.

Mello’s caught in a bizarre state of thinking of everything and nothing—overwhelmed and acutely aware of his surroundings. His feet scrape against the ground, and every little noise seems amplified in his ears.

He doesn’t know what the hell he’s gotten himself into.

A drunk couple stumbles their way into the hotel.

Definitely not them. Well, maybe. He grasps at the camera, and decides that no, if they’re going in to get the bugs, then they’ll have to come out. Mello rolls his shoulders, and wipes at his mouth with his sleeve.  

It’s two men, that enter together and leave together. Nothing out of the ordinary—business-like.

Too expensive for a hotel like this.

_It’s gotta be them._

Mello takes three pictures, holding his hand steady as he does. If he’s going to risk his safety, he’s going to fucking do this right. Thankfully, the only glance he’s spared is a familiar, disgusted sneer. Outside of a brief flick of his eyes, he keeps his gaze fixed on his shoes, kicking around at rocks to look as unaware as possible. It’s fifteen more minutes until the hour mark. In one pocket, his fist is around the gun. His other hand lingers in the center of his chest, near his rosary.

“Those brats’re all over the place.” Is all he hears, and it makes him bite his tongue, but he prefers this over a shootout.

Mello exhales slow, careful, and lingers long after they’re gone. The adrenaline in his veins goes from terrifying to exhilarating. At the park, fifty eight minutes since his split with Rue and Lev, he sinks himself onto a bench.

Done. He _did_ it. Mello smiles at his feet, and swings them back and forth, his toes barely able to scrape against the ground.


	6. June 5, 1998

B revs the second rental bike a little harder than is necessary when he takes off from the hotel. He’s exceptionally exhausted, can’t quite tell if the ringing in his ears is that or A’s laughter. _But I can’t leave Mello, and it’d be too dangerous for Lawliet to go out, things being how they are._

 _We could be up against anyone. But whoever they are, they_ know _A, which might mean they know us_.

His heart lifts when he sees the dirty blonde hair caught in the streetlight, his hand instinctively tightens on the rubber of the grips when the image flashes back to A’s cruel smile, reserved for her disguises. _Just do the extraction, get back to Lawliet._

He slows his bike to the corner of the park, a safe distance from the hotel. He’s in his leather jacket, dark jeans that emphasize the hips, a helmet covering his features. Mello sees him approaching and looks like he wants to run, but B lifts up the helmet just enough for Mello to see his eyes.

“S’alright. Just coming back for you.” B says through the shade of the helmet. Mello is visibly staring at his chest, which is considerably filled out by his set of false breasts, “Don’t you know it’s rude to stare at a woman’s chest?”

B grins under the helmet, offers Mello a hand, “Everything go alright?”

* * *

 

Mello’s eyes are locked right onto Rue’s chest. He blinks, even after his blatancy is pointed out, but he can’t break eye contact. He’s not disturbed—if anything, he’s absolutely fascinated. He grasps Rue’s hand, and pulls himself up, following him to the motorbike. He’s seen people driving by on them in the streets, mostly teenagers, with friends clinging to their backs.

Already, the grass is beginning to get wet with dew, and spare strands cling to his boots. “Uhuh,” Mello says with a slight nod. It’d gone more than alright, really. With Rue back around, he can take a deep breath and let his shoulders droop, tense without even realizing. He hoists himself onto the bike after Rue, and clings to his waist at the roar of the engine. _Loud. “_ I got a couple pictures, so one of ‘em should work. Not too many people came by, but they were the only ones that got there and left,” he rattles off, his fingers curling into the front of Rue’s shirt, as if that’d really do anything if he were to fall off the bike.  “Didn’t have to use the gun, either.”

Christ, Rue drives fast.

Doesn’t help that Mello can’t remember the last time he’s been in or on any sort of vehicle.

Still, he’s brimming with excitement—the air whips at his face, and it makes his eyes pinch shut, but it’s really fucking _cool_ . Kids on the street always talked about motorcycles. About what they’d get when they finally got themselves together. But there’s still the question in the back of Mello’s head of what, exactly, he’s getting involved with. _And why the hell would anyone want to follow these guys_?

The streets are silent, save for the motorbike, and Mello’s heart’s brought itself back as close to normalcy as it’s going to get. In an otherwise empty lot, Rue kills the engine, and they leave the bike. Mello follows, and his eyes go right back to Rue’s chest.

“What’d you give yourself tits for?” Mello asks crudely, He can’t see much of Rue’s face outside of his eyes, and it’s not enough of an indication to tell how much different he looks under the helmet. Mello digs through his pocket, and slips the camera back to him.

* * *

 

“Well, the disguise is obvious, yeah? We’re being hunted. And this disguise in particular.” B pulls off his helmet to reveal the blunt red lipstick, his mid-length hair tossed up in a style that one might expect of a lesbian biker. _People always see what they expect to see._ He slips into a more feminine voice, this one gruff and husky, “If you can pull it off, people don’t see it coming.”

B grins at the way Mello’s jaw drops a bit. _Feel like he wouldn’t be too bad at that, if he gave it a try._ He unlocks the side-stairwell to the hotel, taking the concrete steps slowly enough so that Mello can keep up. It’s a nicer place than the last one, better security, the clean smell of something like Lysol in the hallway. The feeling of Mello behind him is a little comforting. _At least we have some allies in this hell-hole._

“I mean, your question already makes my point: people might expect a woman to dress herself like a man, but people rarely expect a man dressed as a woman. You use that to your advantage, it’s very useful in our line of work. I’d bet even if we were being watched, they’d think twice about thinking there was a connection. Even still, I made sure we weren’t being tailed, hopefully.”

When they reach the third floor, Mello looks as wrung-out as B feels, harrowed eyes taking in the soft-patterned carpet and the bright lighting under clean white lampshades. Lawliet doesn’t even look up from a nest of notes on the other bed, squinting at the diary.

“Bed against the window is yours.” B says to Mello. He sits heavily on the end of the bed, stripping off the leather jacket, and crawling his hands up his back to loosen the bodice. _Long fucking night_. B shuffles Lawliet’s notes slightly out of the way, folds himself downwards. From this angle, Lawliet’s body forms a bony structure of gorgeous lines, sharp whites, impenetrable eyes. It feels safe, here, for the moment. Softened by exhaustion. B swipes a finger absently against Lawliet’s wrist, his fingers tightening slightly against the thrumming pulse there.

“You said we could sleep, right? D’you need anything?”

* * *

 

 

L lowers the diary, reluctant to part with it just as it’s beginning to come together and make some kind of sense. Parts of it, anyway. The street drug that’s been killing people is something called _Krokodil_ , a synthetic, homemade poison that mimics the effects of heroin. A appeared to have been looking for the drug’s source, and suspected it was connected to another group that dealt in weapons and contract killings.

_A’s Diary, page 3_ [do not edit or repost]

And then there’s a the bit about a tattoo and a German doctor, and…really, L will have to just read more later to see if he can figure that part out.

He doesn’t remember A having any kind of tattoo, and he saw all of her. Not that he’s planning to say as much to B at this moment. Instead, he puts the diary on the nightstand and turns to B, lacing their fingers together as he settles down onto the pillows.

“No, I don’t need anything.” Though he does know he won’t be able to sleep right away. What he’d really like is something physical, like exercise or sex. Something to turn his brain off. “Maybe a shoulder massage?” he asks hopefully.

“You got it,” B says, cracking his knuckles and curling his fingers into L’s spine. The pressure feels good, soothing, and the drugs must be more out of his system than he thought, because after a while he finds it hard to keep his eyes open…

_Nightstand, Night watch_ [do not edit or repost]

 

When he wakes up, it’s to the sound of his mobile, squawking from inside his backpack. Lines of sunlight are showing from behind the curtains. The clock shows that it’s 08:49 in the morning.

“It’s me,” Wedy says. “At Pulkovo.”

L gives her instructions on how to get to the hotel and how to enter: No A disguise (not yet); take the elevator all the way to the top floor, then take the stairs back down to the third. Knock in a three-one-one-one pattern. Use the names ‘Lev’ and ‘Rue.”

She shows up just over forty-five minutes later, breezing through the door and past B with hardly a second look, as if it hasn’t been years since she’s seen him. Her arms are heavy with both a small suitcase and a sack of takeout food.

“I figured you two scrawny fucks weren’t eating enough,” she announces. “As usual.”

She puts the food and suitcase down, ripping her hat off and shaking loose her blond hair. “All they gave us on the plane was rubbish bread and bad coffee, so I picked up some McDonald’s, got a little of everything. Even some pies.” She inspects her pink fingernails with a frown, then looks up at the slight movement near the window. It’s Mello, sitting on the edge of the bed and watching her quietly.

“Why the fuck is there a kid here?” She shoots L and B a look. “Are you two back together? It’s a bit fast to be adopting, _Lev_.”

* * *

 

Her fingernails are _bright_ pink, standing out stark against the otherwise dull hotel room. Mello casts a quick glance down to his own nails, still chewed up, with chocolate residue against the edges. If he had nails that long, they’d just break. The second thing he notices is _food_.

In the mess of events that’d been the past few days, Mello had eaten hardly enough to keep him full, and his stomach sits empty, churning, all too aware of the bag in her hands. Figures, when he actually has money, he doesn’t buy enough food. Not that he’d had the appetite for it earlier, by any means.  

 _She’ll dress as A, then_ , he concludes quickly. From Rue’s display, and Lev’s words at the hotel, they’ll play it out all the way through. This woman is intimidating as all hell, but he’s fascinated. His eyes, for a moment, linger on her suitcase.

She only casts him a quick glance before her attention is back on Rue and Lev. Mello prefers it that way.

“I’m helping them,” Mello says quietly. _Working for them? Working_ with _them?_ The hell if he knows. He’s not shy, but she’s holds herself with an authority that makes him shirk back into himself. When he clears his throat, it’s thick, with nerves clotting his airway. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to say, what’s okay to say, or how familiar she is with the situation.

She looks, at best, unimpressed.

“I’m Mello,” he adds hastily. It’s obvious, that he’s a street rat. By now, it’s old news, and the embarrassment has come and gone. He swallows whatever else he’d say. He’s a dime a dozen around here, and he hates that she’s even pointed him out.

His looks from her, to Lev, and then to Rue in a silent plea for help.

* * *

 

B brushes the sleep out of his hair, having had a solid few hours soothed by Lawliet’s gentle breathing. Wedy looks the same as ever, long-legged, perpetually unamused expression, a little too classy and classless to be running with them. He smiles lopsided at Mello. _S’okay, kid. Her bark is worse than her bite_.

“Yeah, he’s kinda one of us now, I’d say. I mean did you even give the gun back to Lev?” B reaches for the take-out bag, passing a burger and fries to Mello, who shakes his head but digs in to the food.  

“You gave him a fucking gun? What is he, seven?”

B bites into a burger of his own, nodding a thanks to Wedy, passing the bag to Lawliet, “Hey, he pickpocketed Lev and I in an alleyway. And he’s been nothing but useful and smart ever since— definitely better than some of the people I’ve had to work with.”

Wedy sucks on her cigarette with a roll of her eyes, “Fucking Christ, you start them young. Still, pickpocketing Lev? Impressive. He’s a skittish bastard. Not sure I could do it.”

“I mean, he might have been a little distracted. And it’s not like the clothes were on him.”

“Well. Guess that answers my other question then.”

“He tried to sell Lev back his own stuff the next day, can you believe it?”

Wedy makes her best attempt at a chastening look at Mello, which comes across as more exasperated, “I might say I’m sorry on behalf of these assholes, but nothing about them surprises me anymore. Don’t get too caught up, or you’ll end up stuck with them like me.”

Mello smiles a little but mumbles something through a mouthful of burger.  

“These Marlboro 72’s?” B has his fingers on her cigarettes, left on the desk top,  which she snatches away. _Same as ever,_ “S'good to see you again, Wedy.”

“Yeah well, I’m not sure if I’ve missed you stealing my cigarettes, or pulling your ass out of the fire–”

“Hey, I think that one went both ways–”

“But I’m glad you both finally got over yourselves. About fucking time.“ she pulls up a chair between the two beds while B casts a questioning glance to Lawliet. _Just how long were you waiting for me to do something?_ The furrow in Lawliet’s brow walks the line between irritation, helplessness, and a distant softness.

“Yeah, it took some time, huh?” B smiles easily at Wedy, but his voice is a little bit softer, without its usual levity. _I’m not letting you wait anymore._ He sits next to Lawliet on the bed so that their thighs are touching. Lawliet nibbles at an apple pie, doesn’t meet his eyes, but presses close to him.

“All right, enough catch-up,” she takes a handful of Lawliet’s untouched fries, “What do you need Frasier for, now of all times?”

* * *

L swallows a corner of pie crust and hides a smile at B and Wedy’s easy banter. They’d always gotten along like cool older-sister and admiring younger-brother, and have fallen back into those roles with nary a hiccup. Despite her sometimes blunt demeanor, Wedy was and is fairly easy to get along with. She and A hadn’t been chummy, but Wedy had still gamely served as her double on a few cases where A had needed to get the drop on someone.

“Because we need a diversion.” L taps his fingers against the cover of the diary and gives Wedy the case-notes version of what they’ve discovered in St. Petersburg so far. “Whoever’s been tailing and bugging us should now believe there’s a possibility that A is alive, so I’d like to arrange for a few sightings, which means you’ll actually posing as A in disguise,” he explains. “See if we can draw them out.”

Wedy assesses him from behind a veil of blue smoke and crosses her legs tightly together. “So let me sort this out. Before she sucked lead, A actually hid a book in a safe behind a mirror, and it had a secret code in it that led you to the address of some shithole apartment, where she stashed some secret diary full of notes about a drug operation, only he –” and here she points at Mello “–found it first?” She laughs out a new lungful of smoke. “That’s bloody mental. Always knew that girl had bats in the belfry.”

“Yes, well,” L fishes around the sack of food for another pie, strawberry this time. “She wanted us to tell stories about her, I suppose.” He thinks he feels B flinch beside him.

_And so we have._

“Take a look at this,” L says, shuffling some of his case notes across the bed. She lifts briefly out of her chair and picks them up. “Those are some symbols we’ve found spray-painted around the city. Do they have any meaning to you at all?”

_L’s Notes, Hexagrams_ [do not edit or repost]

 

She studies the page. “No. What is it, code?”

“Possibly.”

L catches Mello craning his neck over his nearly-finished hamburger, his blue eyes either on the paper Wedy’s holding or on Wedy herself.

“Mello, what about you?” L gives him a nod. “I bet you’ve seen the graffiti.”

* * *

 

Mello puts his food down beside him, wiping his hands on a handful of thin, McDonalds napkins. The burger sits warm, heavy in his stomach when he shifts to get a better look at the notes. He squints, chews on the inside of his mouth, and peers at the symbols. They’re familiar, no doubt. Stuff he’d seen near the Krokodil house, down by the Tochka and absolutely in back alleys and in the bowels of St. Petersburg. Something he’d looked up out of curiosity over a few months ago.

At the time, it’d been more about making a distraction for himself than anything else.

Mello pulls his own journal out from his jacket pocket—a hand sized, battered old thing that looks like its been through hell and back. Thumbing through the pages, he snaps the spine back to lay the book out flat, and shows it to Lev. “They’ve been around a while. Mostly where I’d be,” he says quickly, his eyes darting over the page to refresh himself on what he’d written. Basic notes, mostly meanings of different symbols, and a list of ones he’d come across. Right now, only a handful.

_Mello’s Journal, I Ching Hexagram Research_ [do not edit or repost]

“I’d go to the library and look them up, when I had the time. They’re I-Ching hexagrams,” Mello explains. What they’re for, though, is a different can of worms entirely. No one mentions them, and everyone on the streets seems to pay them little mind when they pass.

To most people, just a kid’s attempt at graffiti. But Mello’d spent so long wandering, learning the veins of the city that any repetition was cause for interest. “There’s a bunch of them. They all mean different things,” Mello adds, pointing to a few of the ones he’d shoddily scrawled down in his book.

“But they’re not Russian, and no one seems to pay them any attention.”

 _Then again, that’s probably the point_.

And he’d never asked Peter about them. They’d been in up to their necks in so much other shit that it seemed frivolous, unnecessary.

_They could’ve picked something that was easy to blend in._

He peers at Lev’s notes again, and rubs at his jaw. “It was near A’s apartment?” he asks, and it’s not surprising—the complex’d been shit. That much, he could tell by the few minutes he’d been there.

* * *

 

“Yeah, in the graveyard.” B rubs his jaw, and tries not to think of how odd her name sounds on Mello’s lips. Tries not to think of how Wedy will look as her ghost, whether he’ll be able to stop himself from choking the illusion by the throat.

 _God knows if I could do it with the hallucinations, I could_ . But his eyes seem to be clear for now, bolstered by sleep and the optimistic bustle of the case moving forward. Moving away from A’s death. _And her lies_.

Mello pulls a beat-up journal from his crumpled jacket, and carefully opens it to a page, hands tight on it. B looks it over carefully, motioning Lawliet over, who immediately draws a finger to his lips, eyes wandering over the page.

“Helpful notes.” Lawliet mumbles distractedly over Mello’s journal. Wedy raises an eyebrow and exchanges a look with B. _He’s good, isn’t he?_

 _“_ Yeah.” B smiles as he realizes the four of them are all huddled together on the bed, even Wedy glancing over his shoulder with practised disinterest. “We’ll definitely be able to use this.”

_So let’s get going. All of us._

 

 


	7. June 6-7 1998

## A's Diary: April 29, 1995

_Remember to ask W for a priv. Jet. Planes are fucking stupid. I wonder if the blankets in the business class stink_

* * *

_I don’t even know what I’m doing here honestly its clear they won’t let anyone help. Cults usually bore me but this one is as organized as an army. Clever too, used an inch long blade hidden in their umbrella to pierce the package with the Sarin._

_5 people have bowed to me so far. I need a mask._

_Got a mask. The top floor from teh the hotel had a terrible view. It’s been raining all day._

_Surveillance tapes came in neatly marked jackets. Impressed with the professionalism but they need to work on their choice of entertainment. Wtched a couple of girls in pink tutus chase a cat in circles for three hours while waiting for the Swedish ambassador to call. Should’ve worked on the circus cold cases._

* * *

## May 2, 1995

_Slipped out for a bit. Want to go to the gay district in ~~shunji~~ Shinjuku. Gonna do all the tourist-y things. Nothing like the the cover of the night to let all the repressed creatures out loose. I am honestly surprised this is the worst case they’ve seen so far. _

_I think I saw a couple of schoolgirls. Met a cute little thing, calls himself Yuki. His accent is clearly heavy, possibly Korean and he’s definitely not 17. Took me back to his place, with a couple of his brothers. They tried flirting but I kneed one in the groin so that’s done._

_He’s so cute, looks a little like **Ryuzaki** when he came all over my face. IN ABOUT 30 SECONDS too haha. I think he’s ruined all faggots for me honestly. He’d be good if he tried but it was obvious he doesn’t know how to handle lady parts. I think he went for the wrong hole a couple of times too what an ass._

* * *

## May 5, 1995 

_Couldn’t get through to Yuki for hours so I took the commisioner’s car. Poor thing was terrified, one of his ‘brothers’ was at the station when it happened. He looks so pretty when he cries._

_Left a wad of 100$ bills and a note. Little fuck probably thinks he’s a kept boy now. But it’s worth it. I WANT TO SEE HIM AGAIN. The next him I’ll have him wear  a white shirt and blue jeans ._

* * *

## May 7, 1995

_Afternoons are hot in the summer when its not raining jesus. I forgot my umbrella again. I walked around for hours (didnt have a watch) and there’s no one around. Not a single soul, I wonder if you need to be a country of a special kind of coward to break this easily after a fucking nerve gas attack really now. wonder how well they’ll do with their fucking mobile phones in Mogadishu_

* * *

_I like cities where it gets all empty in the afternoons and nights, and it makes you feel like you’re the only one here. There aren’t too many places like that left and i’m kinda shocked to see it here. It’s peaceful, I like it. It gets so quiet too the only thing i can hear are the cicadas buzzing and bicycle bells. There’s no sound from any of the houses, i wonder if they’re all dead. I wonder if anyone’s fucking anyone inside, and if they are, they must have stuffed their mouths or something. I want to try that._

* * *

## May 11, 1995

_I’m in a better mood today so being both Deneuve and Deneuve’s handler doesn’t seem to be too bad. But I know W’s gonna send that thief bitch over soon on babysitting duty for me and I’m not looking forward to that. It’s strange really how she and L ended up finding each other, im pretty sure she’s a fag too._

_But It’s good that she’s gonna be here really. Two ladies playing with the big boys is something these fools don’t see often. The officer’s a straight up man, bowed to me at least twice and insists on calling me with the honorifics even though i told him i don’t care. He has a kid., about 9 y.o., got a weird name too I think it was LIGHT? I may be wrong. I remember because he spoke to me in English, correct grammar and all. His dad said he likes reading his case notes. The kid reminds me a little of B, beautiful soft eyes._

_I guess we’re not the only ones._

_I miss B at times, more whn I’m alone. This is a strange fucking place, no one talks in the trains, even when it’s crowded. I walked again today, it still rains and i have no umbrella. I can breathe better in away from the city, the roads are so small, the ramen shop im in looks like it’s a stage prop but I guess they’re made fr impermanence and functionality. The owner told someone to focus on what’s inside and whatnot. I like how they are always so vague and sometimes straight up insincere in guise of being polite.  I know for a fact it’s because the man was staring at my ass._

* * *

## May 11, 1995

_I sometimes feel like im standing still and everything is moving past me. I can’t compare myself from how i was before and say ‘this is how ive changed’. Because i haven’t changed. Not one bit. I’ve not improved, i can’t because i’m at the very top, and i cant stop either. Last month i tried to keep both my eyes closed during the gig at Tehran. Guess what happened. RIGHT THROUGH THE UMBRELLA AND INTO THE HEAD. Heard it exited through his left eye. All this without a tracer, transporter or a helper. Those assholes at Kidon left a long note with the concierge but i’ll be someone’s paid bitch  the day I die so they can keep trying.  Longest fucking snipe in history so far, and that too on my worst day and all I get are two middle aged balding assholes following me . i almost want to lead them to some alley and blow them for free but that’ll remind me too much of B._

_I have decided that he’s really fucking pathetic.. The universe’s favourite chew toy if there ever was one. He’ll fucking kill himelf one day for that bastard and im so numb now i am afraid i wont be there to watch because lets face it he’s BEYOND saving. Haha_

* * *

_I don’t even know why I write in here, its not like anyone will ever read it but doc’s orders and all that. It’s difficult to articulate everything, it seems like i can’t turn my thoughts off. So i’ll just catch the random ones and write them down. Doc said it should help me control the blackouts. I think he’s lying but yeah._

* * *

## May 13, 1995

_Japan is not so bad after all. It’s efficient at least, especially when it comes to wish fulfilment and paid-for debauchery. You walk in and close the door behind you, you get off and no one gets to know. Speaking of, took Yuki out to a love hotel. (he really likes strawbery condoms). He really needs the money so he can go back to Pusan and go to university. I kissed him for that and said I have a Ph.D in artificial intelligence systems haha. Reminded me of that conversation with W about going to a ‘proper’ school. Good times._

* * *

_Drew a sketch of Yuki’s dick later during the police conference. The commisioner’s fast Kansai  dialect gives me a headache. (I think L’s cock was a lot smaller. Almsot an inch, maybe less)_

_I want to take him back to Winchester. If I dress him well and solve all his cases for him, I might be able to convince W that he’s a superkid too . That old bastard will love him. And Yu-chan can attend ‘proper’ Uni in my place and everyone would be happy. He can be a better L, Fuck anyone can be a better L AT THIS POINT and all he has to do is bend over for me. That’s what L does for B anyway_

_I sometimes wish I had a dick too. I’d really like to fuck him._

* * *

## May 16, 1995

_My tip about that jesus fucker was right. They should have locked them all up right after the thing at Matsumoto_

_It’s always the crazy ones. . This nutter won’t be the last one screaming about being God_

 

* * *

 

**June 6, 1998**

_ _

_Undressing with the Eyes [do not edit or repost]_

* * *

 

**June 7, 1998**

The hotel room is too fucking small.

B lights his third cigarette in an alarmingly short period, staring out the window at the monstrosity perched on the roof of the shop front below. The monster he’d seen at the graveyard has feathers tucked into and under its hunched body, its arms lengthy past its spindly knees.

It waves again. B doesn’t wave back. _Fuck you, A._

Wedy is out on recon, and Mello is taking a bath for the moment. Normally he’d use this time to talk to Lawliet (either by words or by touch), but they’ve both been tense and drawn apart from the case. Lawliet has been hunched over the hexagrams, awake for more than twenty-four hours now. Not that B has slept much either, pacing back and forth in the hotel room, reading and rereading the cheap thriller novel in his jacket, trying not to hover.

B has always hated laying low, waiting things out. The only useful thing he’s been able to do is lift the name _Andrei Vasiliev_ from Mello’s photographs, once Wedy had brought back the prints. _And even then, his death date is far out. So it’s dangerous for us to get close._

 _We might not have a choice_. B remembers the scrawled words on A’s last diary entry. _HE KNOWS EVE–._

_She might have been fucking insane, but she was onto something, here._

B has the diary in his hands before he’s fully conscious of them movement, the black face feeling heavy and inscrutable. He hasn’t gotten a chance to look through it yet, has been tacitly avoiding anything A would have considered ‘personal’. _She’s just a fucking case now._

He takes a breath, and his fingers force him back to ‘95. When he and A had started. _May. Would have been just after Apatzigan._ The warm, cramped nature of the room takes him back there, skinny and starved out of his mind, seeing Lawliet on every corner. B glances sharply back to Lawliet’s hunch on the bed, just to make certain he’s still there.

B forces himself to read.

  _‘I miss B at times, more whn I’m alone. This is a strange fucking place, no one talks in the trains, even when it’s crowded. I walked again today, it still rains and i have no umbrella. I can breathe better in away from the city, the roads are so small, the ramen shop im in looks like it’s a stage prop but I guess they’re made fr impermanence and functionality. The owner told someone to focus on what’s inside and whatnot. I like how they are always so vague and sometimes straight up insincere in guise of being polite.  I know for a fact it’s because the man was staring at my ass.’_

 _And isn’t this what I expected, before I knew how deeply you fucked us over?_ There are angry tears at his eyes, his own fingernails digging into his palm. A writes too _ugly_ not to be real, and there’s a softness in it, a brutality, an honesty. He wants to throw the book down and _burn_ it like the drawings of her, then he catches his name again.

_‘I have decided that he’s really fucking pathetic.. The universe’s favourite chew toy if there ever was one. He’ll fucking kill himelf one day for that bastard and im so numb now i am afraid i wont be there to watch because lets face it he’s BEYOND saving. Haha.’_

He does visibly _flinch_ then, thinking of all the times she’d softly insisted that he was worth sticking around for. Even when he hadn’t believed it himself. And she’d played innocent, virginal for him, made it seem like he was ‘teaching’ her to seduce that June, just as she taught him how to kill with lethal precision. _What a fucking crock, back when you were fucking anyone who walked your way._

B knows what that’s like, too. Losing yourself in bodies. _Wish I fucking didn’t._ His eyes pass over the last few passages, the last accounts of A’s pathetic replacement tryst. _Not that I can talk about that._

_‘He can be a better L, Fuck anyone can be a better L AT THIS POINT and all he has to do is bend over for me. That’s what L does for B anyway’_

He sucks in a breath, slamming the book shut. _I can’t fucking handle this_.

_She really hated him, didn’t she?_

“He’ll fucking kill himself one day for that bastard.” B wishes the voice were in his head, dark and feminine and knowing, but he can’t help but hear it in his ears as he turns desperately to Lawliet. Even the image of him close by on the bed doesn’t slow the pulse of his heart.

_But what the fuck was she after with me?_

* * *

 

For the better part of the last six hours, L has been studying the book on  _I-Ching_ that Wedy picked up for him. As an ancient form of divination and cleromancy, it involves the tossing of coins or yarrow stalks. As a possible code of communication, though, it seems far too straight-forward for anyone hoping to maintain secrecy. 

The hexagram found in the graveyard and in Yakutsk is _ta chuang_ , which stands for “the power of the great.” The one outside A’s dumpy apartment, ironically enough, represents _sun_ , or “the gentle,” and the ones in the alley and in Moscow are _kuei mei_ (”the marrying maiden”) and _hsiao kuo_ (”preponderance of the small”). L is convinced, though, that the hexagrams are just a disguise and cover for some more complicated form of coding.

He only looks up, a hard lemon candy lodged in his cheek, when he hears B slam a book shut. _That_ book. L wishes he could convince himself that B is skimming it for more clues, but he knows that would only be half-true. Being cooped up is making B jumpy, giving him too much time to dwell on A and her words, laid bare on stark paper. 

L pushes his notes aside, listens for the sound of water running in the bathroom. Mello won’t be out for a while.

“B,” he says quietly, and it feels like a relief to call him by his real name instead of _Rue_. “Talk to me.” 

* * *

 

B steps over to the bedside and takes a seat at the foot of the bed, so that  Lawliet’s toes brush his thigh. Part of him wants to _tear_  at the bed, _tear off_  that white shirt and let Lawliet fuck the uncertainty out of him.

 _Probably for the best that I can’t. Too many things to leave unsaid._  He takes a breath.

“I’m fucking glad she’s dead.” is the first thing that comes out. B isn’t sure he means it, not really. _But I said it, didn’t I?_

“I feel like she was fooling me the whole time, but _why,_ I just can’t see it. She calls me pathetic, she sees me on every corner?” _she fucks you behind my back?_ His vision goes flickers smoky for a moment, but the edges of the hotel room seem safe, if a bit cramped. B exhales, “Why the _fuck_ would she leave all this for us?”

 _I_ _mean I guess it’s all we ever did, another case another day. That’s all we know._  He takes a harsh drag from the Marlboro, coughing slightly. _Pack it up in another mystery, make people dance round your grave. What a way to go out._

“I just don’t know why I ever thought I could trust her.”

* * *

 

L crawls down the rumpled sheets toward B and sits beside him, plucking the cigarette from his fingers and taking a half-drag that makes him cough, too, the flavor made more bearable by the candy still in his mouth. In a matter of days B’s gone from intense mourning, from worrying that he should have done more for A, even, to being glad that she’s dead. The switch would dizzy him if it weren’t perfectly in keeping with B himself.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he says, voice low. “She gave you what you needed, once, and that hasn’t changed.”

He tucks the cigarette back between B’s fingers and lays down on his back to stare up at the ceiling. “People can have terrible things inside of them. Even the ones who seem to be helpful, seem to be kind.” He shudders a little, shaking off the ghost of a memory that he won’t contend with. Not now.

“I don’t know if A had anything inside of her at all,” he continues, thinking of how her eyes would follow the people surrounding her, looking for something to lock onto, to make use of. “I think she feared that she didn’t, so she pulled out of others what she could – not just for her job, but to make herself feel more real.” 

He touches B’s side, trailing his fingers down to his hip. “You made her feel more real than anyone. That’s why.”

Swallowing, he closes his eyes, lets his hand drop away. “I’m sorry.” 

 _Sorry_. He doesn’t know what for, but he knows that B’s hurting and he knows that’s what you say to someone who’s hurt. For what little good it does. 

* * *

 

 _“People can have terrible things inside of them_.”

 The words cut deep into his psyche, images flickering past his vision of all the lips and eyes he’s sliced open and smiled at with detached fascination. Everything he’s capable of, just as well. Just like her. A’s hallucination laughs in his memory. _Fuck off._

 _I might be a murderer and a monster, but I’m_ nothing _compared to her._  The thought feels hollow even as a lump starts to thicken in his throat. The burn is more caustic, more insidious than the anger. It _crawls_  into his veins, cooled only slightly by the drag of Lawliet’s fingertips. 

_“You made her feel more real than anyone. That’s why. I’m sorry.”_

“It _felt_  real.” his voice tears at the throat, just a little, “Most of the time.”

_I could kill her for trying that, trying that with me, letting me fill my emptiness with her when all along she–_

B doesn’t know where the thought begins and ends, but it’s choking him, just a little, with a loneliness he thought he’d never feel again. _Not with you here._  Raw magnetism takes his fingers to the edges of Lawliet’s cheekbone, his other hand digging hard into the blankets straight through to the mattress as he leans over. Violence through gentleness.

 _Just the way she used to._  But Lawliet’s coal-eyes search in a way that hers never did, lean in and look through him. _See_ him. _You’re here._

He hesitates a breath before Lawliet’s lips “I’m sorry too.”

B presses their lips together, and tries, _tries_  to breathe through the bittersweet lemon of Lawliet’s tongue as it it might erase the ghosts of the years between them. 

It feels _real._  B forces himself to believe that.

Lawliet’s soft lips pull away slowly with a gust of air, leaving B hungry for a primal, violent closeness. Something to burn out the gentleness, brand it into something real. He fingers the dirty split ends Lawliet’s hair, keeping eye contact.  _I want to be able to trust you the way I thought I could with her. I have to be able to. I have to._

The thought is a heartbeat away from his lips when the bathroom door opens, and B drops his hand and sits up with a start. 

* * *

 

Mello comes out of the bathroom swaddled in at least two towels, looking very much like a small mummy. L sees how B’s lips quirk at the sight, turning up in a half-smile, and L finds himself unexpectedly grateful for the boy’s presence.

The same goes for Wedy, who shows up a few minutes later dressed in casual street clothes: worn jeans, black tank top, baseball cap, and sunglasses – the last in the same brand A favored. It’s the sort of thing A would have worn to both blend in and semi-hide her features, but it isn’t Wedy’s style at all, so she hurriedly slips off her backpack and dumps it into a chair, then shoves off her beat-up sneakers.  

“Someone was following me near the embankment,” she says. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t either of the guys who planted the bugs, though. This one stopped following me once he sensed I was onto him.”

“Did you get a visual?” L asks, climbing off the bed and peering into her backpack. 

“No, he kept too far back.” She snatches the backpack away from him, sunglasses pushed up onto the top of her head. “Paws off, Lev. This stuff is for the kid.” 

Mello looks up from his seat on the bed, a towel draped over his head.

“New threads,” she says, tossing Mello a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. “Your old ones stink, no offence.” 

“How thoughtful,” L remarks, curling a finger into his mouth and giving her a deliberately long look. 

Her eyes narrow; she’s known L long enough to know when he wants something. “What is it?” 

“Rue and I need to take care of some things tonight. It would be helpful if you could take Mello out to the movies or an arcade. Something fun.” 

“Do I look like a babysitter?” She directs the question to B, who only shrugs with a smile as she bends over to steal one of his cigarettes.

“You _did_ bring him new clothes.”

She bounces on the edge of the bed next to B and leans over to give Mello the once over. “Sure, okay. I’ll take him to the movies. Maybe _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ is playing somewhere nearby. Ever read any Hunter S. Thompson when you were hanging out in the library?” 

Mello nods once, earning a grin from Wedy. 

* * *

The door slams behind Wedy and Mello, and B lets out a sigh that's a little like relief, a little like regret. 

 “As much as I wish we were getting a babysitter for the usual reasons,” B sits up and stretches, ready to hit the streets, “guessing it’s time to take the fight to them?”

“Evidence first.” Lawliet is packing up his notes in short, quick movements, and inclines his head towards the mess of various clothing in B’s duffel bag.

“You got it, sweetheart.” B starts rummaging through the collection, which is a little thin. _Homeless might be the best bet to blend in._

“Guess you’ll be happy that this disguise stays loose. We’ll be going as addicts.” B picks through Lawliet’s clothes, many of which fit the bill too well. _If the shoe fits…_

B watches Lawliet slip a faked notebook full of cryptic nonsense in the hotel’s wall safe. The room is bugged in _their_ favour now, and with Mello and Wedy out, it might even be useful for their enemies to try the same thing.

_Early for that though._

The two of them pack weapons silently into the folds of their clothing, butterfly knife, and Desert Eagle semiautomatic for B; a Beretta 92 for Lawliet. B rustles around in his bag for an old stiletto when his hand falls upon A’s Fallkniven blade. He slips it out of the sheath and A’s eyes glare at him in the reflection of the blade.

B doesn’t look behind him, but tucks it into his jacket a little sharply. Lawliet glances at him, but B simply rolls his shabby jacket sleeves up. _I’m fine._

“You’ve got an address for this Andrei Vasin, right?” B remembers the letters in red floating above Mello’s photograph of the dark-eyed, tough looking man. Lawliet nods.

“Let’s get going.” B’s blood is singing under his skin, and he can’t wait to hit the streets, even if it means he’ll see A on every corner.

_Let her come. You thought he knew everything, didn’t you, A?_

* * *

 

L’s research and phone calls to Q helped track Andrei Vasin to an address not far from the Tauride Gardens, so after leaving the hotel via a back fire escape, they take the subway to Chernyshevskaya station. By now, anyone looking for them will likely know to keep an eye out for two men on a motorbike. 

The harsh lights of the subway car hurt L’s eyes, and he hunches over and into himself, keeping his gaze trained between his beat-up shoes. The ride seems to go on forever, but the dirt and scuff marks on the train floor are a pattern that grounds him, as does the warmth of B’s wrist, pressed against his. His work style ( _throw yourself into it all the way, life and limb_ ) isn’t really suited to extended field work. Once they’re done with this case, once they’ve tucked A back in her grave, L needs to return to his old life.

_And what about B? Does he come along? Does your ‘old life’ become his new one? Because he’s got his own beat now, and has for a while…_

The questions dance around his brain like flies. Questions for later. But soon. 

The address leads them to row of tidy brick town homes on a relatively quiet street, except for the music and laughter coming from a restaurant one block over. L makes a quick study the rounded casement windows along the building’s foundation and notes that the ones beneath Andrei’s house number have their glass blacked out, a detail he points out to B in a whisper. 

“Supplier or manufacturer,” he says. “Maybe both.” 

An occasional car glides by, but the street is otherwise empty. 

“What do you reckon? There’s lights on upstairs. B&E into the basement? Or knock on the door like proper addicts, hoping for a fix?” 

* * *

 

The laughter from the restaurant makes B twitch a bit, but his pulse is picking up and he can’t wait to get inside, _rip_ out answers, fists and skin and bones for the taking. Lawliet’s question catches him off-guard, and his face falters a little when he realizes where his mind had wandered to. B isn’t used to having a partner who _knows_ him.

Nor one who he cares so deeply about making it to the other side.

_Relax. It’s just like in Vegas. Lawliet can handle himself, and he can handle you._

“Let’s do both. Do you think you can get the front? You look the part, more than I do, at least.” B catches the slight tremor of Lawliet’s fingers, holds them up like evidence. Lawliet snatches them back, nods curtly. “I’ll cut the power once you’re inside. If there are sensors I don’t want to deal with the police again.”

B steps towards the back, eye on a window whose blackout has a slightly different catch under the light.

 _We’ll have to have_ that _conversation at some point._ It would be one thing for B to let it lie if they were parting as friends, but things are _different_ now. _They have to be._ He finds the expected crack along the window glass and softly wedges the glass to a clean break, with his knife, so that it falls into his hand. Careful to stay away from the sharp edges, he silently eases the window towards him.

The doorbell rings. B tenses, almost flinching his wrist into the broken glass and peeling paint. The window is open. Peering in, no one downstairs. _Lucky for us._

Part of B wants to go back and tear Lawliet out of there, but he can hear the front door open and he’s already got half a steel-toed boot in the room. He hits the ground, scans it quickly to find the circuit breaker, next to which is a small flashlight. He clicks it on while cutting the main power. _Beats using matches, beats using rats._ B flashes the lights over the room to get a better look before the inevitable company.

The dim bulb flashes over a makeshift lab on top of splintered wood and a dirty concrete floor. Over-the-counter codeine. Paint thinner? Red phosphorus? _Shit, they’re making this cheap. No wonder it’s killing ‘em._ The ingredients are stacked in looming, industrial piles.  On the other side B recognizes the usual outfit for heroin, precise little hot plates and chemical glassware though much smaller.   _They get them hooked and then rot them on the cheap stuff._ _But they keep selling, just enough for it to be profitable if they cut it with this shit._

B wants to take more in, sift through the stack of paper next to the box of phosphorus but there’s a loud thump upstairs and what could be a gunshot.

B sprints up the wooden stairs two at a time before he can even think.

* * *

 

L watches B head for the rear of the building, adjusts his concealed weapon, and arranges his limbs into something unsteady and shrinking, running his fingers through his hair once to ensure that it looks even messier than usual. Then he punches the doorbell and waits, listening for the sound of heavy footsteps from inside. 

The door opens far enough to show half of a man’s frowning face, set with thick, dark eyebrows – it’s Andrei Vasin, L recognizes him from the photographs Mello took. 

“What do you want?” He asks, eyes flicking around to assess if L is alone, apparently not recognizing L as the person whose hotel room he’s been bugging. 

Hugging his torso to mimic the cold waves of someone going through heroin withdrawal, L coughs a few times and shifts from foot to foot. “Looking for product,” he rasps in broken Russian. 

Andrei’s face stiffens into a deeper frown “And who told you to come here?”  
L ignores the question and starts shuffling through his pockets, letting a few 100 ruble banknotes tumble from his fingers. “I can pay." 

Andrei opens the door wider and yanks L in by his shirt sleeve just as he scoops up the last note. "Get inside,” he hisses, shoving L into an entryway that opens up into a nicely-furnished sitting room. There’s even a piano in the corner.

“Who’s the fuck’s this?” Another voice asks as the front door shuts behind them. It belongs to a man who’s skinny but dangerous-looking, his front teeth mostly grey and an angry scar raking down his cheek. Andrei’s lackey, maybe.

He’s got a gun holstered under his left shoulder. Ruger Redhawk. 

“Some junkie.” Andrei grabs L by the front of his hair and yanks his head up, forcing L to meet his dark eyes. “How’d you find your way here, little lamb?” He smiles, but is voice is anything but friendly. 

“I’m a tourist, you know,” L stammers, swaying on his feet a little for good measure. “I asked around about where to score, and some guy gave me this address.”

Andrei breathes hard through his nose before letting go of L’s hair and shoving him away.

“Pat him down,” Andrei says to the lackey, just as the overhead lights flicker, then go out. There’s still enough daylight outside yet that the room isn’t plunged into complete darkness, but both Andrei and his muscle glance upward in surprise, the lackey standing up so fast that he knocks over his chair and shatters a vase. L contemplates using their very brief moment of distraction to grab for his own gun, but Andrei, quicker than L would have ever anticipated, lunges for him and yanks his arms behind his back.

“No so fast, lamb,” he hisses in L’s ear. “I suppose you know who cut the lights?” L goes deliberately limp and boneless as Andrei finds the Beretta and tosses it to the lackey. 

“Lamb has teeth,” the lackey observes, palming the gun and setting it on top of the piano. 

“It was protection,” L protests, still swaying in Andrei’s grip. “That’s all.” 

The lackey takes a step closer, grinning his grim, grey smile. “Protection, huh? Yeah, I think you’ll need it.” 

And just then, _thank god_ , there’s a cold shift in the air – nothing that the other two men can detect, focused on L as they are, but it’s a distinct draft. 

It can only be B, finding his way out of the basement.

* * *

 

From the reflection on a cheap mirror in the hallway, B can just make out the nightmarish scene, Andrei holding Lawliet in an arm bar and another man, gun in hand, looking warily back and forth for instruction. There’s a shattered vase on the floor, but it doesn’t look like shots have been fired. _Yet._ From inside the mirror a woman with cruel eyes and red hair blows the air off a gun, smirking at him. Then her smile falters as she points the gun at Andrei, then at his partner.

 _Is this what you fucking wanted, A?_ His death date isn’t soon, as B well knows. It’s information extraction, and they intend to use it. _You’re lucky we want the same things_. Or maybe that’s what she knew would happen.

“Find his partner.” Andrei’s Russian is heavy and deep, “Kill him. We’ll get what we need from this one.”

 _Death date: June 7, 1998._ B doesn’t bother to read the lackey’s name, pulls the basement door silently open and slips behind it, flat to the cheap plaster on the wall. Barely a second later, heavy boots rush towards the basement. B slams the door forward to give himself a moment before he jumps on the man’s back, A’s knife in hand.

B locks his legs the man’s chest as he scrambles for the right angle and the man tries to reach his arm back with the gun, staggering into the hallway and fumbling with the trigger _too slow_.

 _That one’s from_ her.B thinks as he pulls the Fallkniven  _hard_  over the meat of the man’s throat ( _skin is always soft there)_. The blood gushes onto B’s fingertips as he jumps back to the floor, locking eyes with Andrei and reveling in the copper-rust smell, the way the adrenaline rush _sharpens_ his normally chaotic senses.

Andrei, to his credit, only gapes for a half a moment before beginning to react, but that’s all Lawliet needs to shove his skull back into his attacker’s nose and slip out of his grip. Andrei lunges, half-stunned for the gun on the piano, his body hitting the keys with a cacophonic _crash_ , Lawliet following him, desperately trying to jar the gun out of reach. _Too close_. A Bowie knife flashes in the dim sunlight, blood on the floor and Lawliet hitting the floor with a sharp gasp.

 _No no fuckfuckfuck_. B blinks in technicolor, but Lawliet is already up, one hand on his shoulder but still moving fast.

“Drop the knife.” B levels the Desert Eagle at Andrei a moment too late.

“Drop the gun.” Andrei’s left hand has found its way onto the Beretta, and he’s pointing it right between Lawliet’s eyes.

* * *

 

L’s shoulder is on fire from where the knife sliced him, but the pain fades to the background at the touch of gunmetal to his head, sending a dump of fresh adrenaline into his blood. His own fucking gun, no less.

At the same time, he glimpses the wild fear and fury in B’s eyes and knows he has to act – can’t just stay frozen like cornered prey. _Act._ Someone’s finger is going to twitch, any second now.

“Andrei,” he says in clear Russian, voice calm as he can muster, even as his lungs scream desperately for more air.  "Andrei, we know who you are. We’re the two you’ve been following around the city. The one’s whose hotel room you bugged.“  
  
Andrei stiffens a little, then shifts so that L can make out his frowning profile.

“Whoever you work for, I think it’s a safe assumption that they probably don’t want us dead, yes?” L swallows thick and takes a steady breath. 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Andrei shakes him a little and B lets out a tiny yelp, flinching as if he’s about to lunge forward. L fixes him with a steady gaze. _Wait. Just wait, B._

“I’ve never see you two in my whole life.” A fine spray of spit flies from Andrei’s lips. 

“The Hotel Moyna. You were there just a few days ago. Room 501.“ 

This time, Andrei’s only reply is the silence of careful thinking. It catches L off-guard. No one should have to work that hard to remember recent events. 

"I even have a photograph inside the notebook in my pocket that shows you at the hotel,” L offers. 

Andrei backs away from L slightly, the gun still outstretched. “Show me,” he says. “But pull out a weapon and you’re dead." 

L nods hastily, rooting through his pockets for the palm-sized notebook. "Here,” he says, stretching the photograph out for Andrei to see. “That’s you, right?”

He utters no words of anger or protest, but goes deathly silent, the beretta wavering just slightly in his hand. A trickle of sweat glides down his forehead and he blinks erratically.

“Do you normally have trouble remembering things? Or experience lost time?” L dares to take a tiny step forward. “We should put the guns away and talk.”

* * *

 

B locks eyes with Andrei, sifting the fibres of his iris, the twitch of his lips for any sign of deception. The two of them lower the guns in slow unison. B brushes the blood off his cheekbone, checking frantically at the red oozing out of Lawliet’s shoulder. _Seems stable for now._ He gestures back at Andrei’s knife with a glare.

"The knife stays,” Andrei grunts, pointing it at B with an ugly twist to his lips, “Put yours on the ground. There are two of you, and you killed Mogilevich. I’m not taking chances”

“It wasn’t personal.” _his number was up, I was just the one to check the box._ B makes a show of wiping the blood on his jeans before setting A’s knife down, “Not like the bugging seemed to be.”

“That wasn’t me,” the insistence seems weak, but not a lie. B knows liars. Andrei’s fists tense and relax, his hand pinning the bowie knife to the carpet, “All right, it’s happened before. Sometimes when I’m outside things just kind of—slide in and out, things I remember. That’s why I stay in and don’t distribute. But I have no idea who the fuck you two are.”

“Do you think it’s from the drugs?” B side-glances at Lawliet. _What the hell is up with this guy?_

“Fuck off. I know what it is I sell, and I don’t dip into it.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” B tries, and fails, to keep the growl out of his voice, “And it oughta rot in hell. How did you come up with that, what, turpentine and codeine? Christ.”

“I don’t fucking know, it just came to me, alright?” he’s getting more agitated now, and Lawliet shoots B a warning glance, _I know. Calm him down. Calm yourself down_.

“Easy. We’re not here to bust you for whatever that is. We’re just looking to get whoever it is off our back. Does the name Elliot Holmes mean anything to you?” B stares the man down, but Andrei shakes his head, white-lipped.

“What about Deneuve?”

“Detective, right? Just know to stay off that radar.”

"One more question,” Lawliet interjects, flipping open his notebook, “Do these symbols mean anything to you?”

Lawliet flips open his notebook to the neat sketches of the I ching, passes it slowly over to Andrei.  He sneers skeptically before his eyes fall down to the page. The effect is immediate. His pupils widen first, then his eyelids droop, the sockets flickering slightly back and forth. The left hand on the bowie knife loosens. He says nothing.

B stares a moment, then tries again, “Hey. Do they mean anything?”

“The targets. The ones he was looking for.” His voice is lower, deeper, and from underneath his eyelids is a flicker of recognition when he glances mechanically from Lawliet, back to B.

“Who?” 

“Dr. Rolf Voigt.”

B hesitates before he asks again, “Why us?”

“He needs to find more like _her._ Make more like _me._ ” A chill runs down B’s spine, and beside him, A’s ghost giggles through a mouthful of blood.

* * *

 

From neuro-linguistic programming to MKUltra, L’s both read and heard about mind control, but has never witnessed anything that could be classified as such. Thanks to Wammy’s former ties to the CIA and the SIS he also knows some of the details behind MKUltra, all of them now lost to a swath of destroyed records. 

L has no solid reason to doubt that a program like MKUltra couldn’t be continuing today, under a different name entirely. Perhaps Russia’s had their own version of it for decades. 

 _Since 1978, even?_ The year of A’s birth. 

"I think our friend here has been programmed,” L says softly, to which B gives him a reeling, incredulous look. 

L flashes the page of I-Ching symbols at B. ‘I thought they were secret communications. I was wrong – they’re triggers.“ Andrei looks back and forth between them, vaguely dazed. Waiting. "As far back as Ancient Egypt and Babylon, humans have experimented with the combination of trauma and drugs to create a state of mental enslavement." 

"The CIA used 'trigger words,’ supposedly,” L continues. “This group is using symbols.” He bends over and looks into Andrei’s eyes, which are strangely dilated. “Who’s your handler? Is it Rolf Voigt?”

The pupils constrict a little. “No. He made me, but he sends another.”

L directs a look to B. “Maybe the handler is the second man in the photograph.” They’d been so focused on discovering who the 'Andrei’ mentioned in A’s diary was that they scarcely noted the name of the other man. “Or the man you killed.” It would make an ironic sort of sense for a handler to pose as a mere lackey. 

“You say he made you, but what are you?” B asks Andrei, his expression so unsettled that L is sure B is seeing more than just the horrors in this particular room. 

“Matryoshka,” Andrei says, his smile grim and flat.

_Doll._

* * *

 

The word rolls over B, catching the full meaning a moment later. Human dolls—nested layer upon layer to prevent the truth from rearing its ugly head. _God, Acey. Is this what they made you?_ Pity, along with an ugly satisfaction, knots its way into B’s throat. He swallows. _Is this why you sent us after them?_

_Why you wanted to die?_

A thousand questions are screaming in his mind, but all that B asks is, “You knew her, didn’t you?”

“Anya. Anya. Anya.” he’s getting more agitated now, gripping and dropping the knife, shaking his head back and forth. Slowly, Lawliet eases the Beretta out from underneath him. Andrei doesn’t seem to notice. B puts a hand slowly on his semi-automatic, but doesn’t grab it just yet.

“Was she…like you?” B asks.

“Who.”

“Anya.”

“Who.” Andrei goes docile for a moment, blank and receptive as before. B exchanges a glance with Lawliet, who tugs a photograph out from the notebook, of A’s profile. The 1995 disguise, red hair and thin lips.

“Identify her.” is all Lawliet says. Andrei takes the photograph slowly in his fist.

As his glazed eyes focus on the photograph, he squeezes them tight shut, letting out a slight gasp. When his eyes open, they fall on the still-open page of I Ching symbols. His entire body seizes up for a moment, Lawliet snatching for the book, but it’s too late. _He’s gone_. Andrei starts to his, feet, lithe, but still disoriented. He sees Moglivich’s corpse first, the blood forming a generous pool on the floor. Then he turns back to the two of them, both pointing guns between his eyes.

“Oh god, Oh god. He’s dead, fuck, who are you? Who the fuck is this?”

“Don’t move.” Lawliet stands up, taking a few paces towards B. He crosses both of his fingers, the sign for _retreat slowly_.

“Jesus Christ, Jesus fucking Christ. His throat’s been fuckin cut, shit.”

“Do you know who we are?” B asks.

“I’ve never seen him or either of you in my goddamn life, _fuck_. “ _He’s a lot more afraid than he was. Not like before, where he probably would have tried to kill us with that knife if he could have._

“You know Rolf Voigt?”

“Yeah, I know the doc.” Andrei has wide-eyes on B’s Desert Eagle.

“You tell him that A wants to talk with him. That’s the girl in the picture you’re holding.” Andrei’s hands shake as his eyes flicker back to the photograph, recognition sincere in his glance.

“The whore? I thought she was dead.”

B almost laughs, A’s ghost laughing with him, backing out the door with L by his side. He can’t resist a flair for the dramatic. _After all, neither could she._

“He might wish that, when she’s through with him. Don’t move for another five minutes, or you’ll end up with your throat open as well, or with a bullet in your brain.” the empty threat drops with weight into the room, and B shuts the front door, grabs Lawliet’s hand, and starts out at a run down the blackened streets. 

* * *

**June 7, 1998 - Mello**

Mello’s new shirt is soft, fresh against his skin. He salvages his jacket, at least, his journal tucked back into the pocket, but Wedy is insistent on shoving the remaining balled up articles into a thin plastic bag. More likely than not, destined for the garbage. “I read his book about the motorcycle gangs,” he says. “Hell’s Angels, I think. He’s really good,” Mello adds with a half smile.

Wedy, out of her disguise, wears all black despite the June heat. Cool looking clothes, something Mello would expect from a celebrity. Someone important.

Down the road, they blow right by the movie theater. Half, Mello presumes, because he looks less than thrilled at the suggestion, and half, he presumes, because Wedy looks _particularly_ uninterested. In the middle of the day, a movie seems useless.

They mutually decide that a shooting range—thanks to Wedy’s persuasion—would be in better taste.

After all, what’s the point of having a gun if he doesn’t _really_ know how to use it? He tells himself that he’ll give it back eventually, but for now, neither Rue nor Lev have asked, and besides sitting in Wedy’s purse for safekeeping, the two seemed content with turning a blind eye.

Mello learns, quickly, that he would’ve been fucking dead if the stakeout had gone wrong. He can’t shoot for shit, and bullets ping against everything but his target. His imagination swims with thoughts of what it’d be like to be able to hit whatever he wants on his first try. To carry a gun like assassins in the books he reads, or like spies who kept them hidden on their bodies, tucked beneath layers and layers of clothing.

He had to have been one of the few boys that never wanted to grow up to be a police officer.

His eyes blow wide as Wedy cocks the gun with a single hand, and hits the target with ease. Against the gun’s exterior, her bright pink nails stand out, and Mello can’t help but look down at his own, still chewed down into nearly nothing.

His whole chest twists with frantic excitement.

It takes four tries, to really hit the target. Mello doesn’t care—he’s thrilled that he even hit it at all. He wants to be _better._ Like Wedy, who can shoot in a split second, no time wasted on fumbling around to get it just right. At the orphanage, he can learn anything. He can study about guns, motorcycles, whatever the hell fancies him.

Still, Mello’s gut clenches, familiar anxiety fluttering in his stomach. Nervous as all hell, whether he wants to be or not. Things, now, are going _damn_ well. But that doesn’t help the mantra of _what if what if what if_ rushing through his head. He acknowledges, with a gun in his hand and new clothes hanging off of his body, that Rue and Lev must have some level of trust for him. And he knows, by now, that they have no reason to harm him.

“Rue and Lev grew up in England, right? Is this the first time they’ve had this happen?” Mello asks, running his hand through his his hair to tuck a handful behind his ear. “An orphan situation, I mean.” The word feels bizarre, tumbling out of his mouth. Something that hangs over his head, brands him a failure before he’s even had a chance to start.

Wedy exhales a mouth full of smoke, eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses. “Lev found Rue on the streets when they were just kids. Took him back to that school with him – not that Rue minded. They were God damn inseparable when I met them.”

Mello’s nothing short of relieved. He can look at the two of them and have some sort of hope for the future. Rue and Lev could travel, they’d had the opportunity to learn, to _live._

In England, Mello can _be_ someone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Note: The typos in A's diary entries are deliberate)
> 
> More chapters to come, though we're getting closer to the end! In the meanwhile, we love comments and feedback! :)


	8. June 7-8 1998

**June 7 1998 [9:32 pm]**

The streets are lightly populated as they head back to the Chernyshevskaya station, avoiding the beams of the streetlights that have just switched on. L thinks his shoulder wound has stopped bleeding, but there’s still a large, vivid stain sopped into the light grey fabric of his sweatshirt.

“Can I wear your jacket?” L asks, and B shrugs off the black garment and hands it over. “Thanks.” He winces, muffles a gasp as he gingerly pulls the jacket on.

With the violence disguised for now, they take the train back to the station near their hotel, though when they exit out onto the street B guides them into a pub across the way, earning no fuss from L.

_Good. We can debrief before returning to Wedy and Mello._

And he’s starving, too, as it so happens. Now that the adrenaline is gone his whole body feels scraped over and exposed, the shake in his hands so bad he’s grateful he didn’t have to fire his gun. Odds are he would have missed his target.

The crowd in the pub is thin, but not so thin they’ll stand out. They take a high table near the back and place their orders right away: fish and chips for B, and risotto with apples for L, and some black Russian bread and cherry preserves for them both

“Your shoulder?” B asks, concern darkening his brow.

“I’ll live. Might have to ask Wedy to stitch it up.” _She’ll like that_. It’s a perverse pleasure of hers.

The food comes to the table fast, and L eats half his risotto before he looks up from the bowl and wipes off his mouth.

“So A wasn’t after a drug ring. She was after an organization that deals in some form of human programming, and presumably funds their operation with drug money.” He keeps his voice low and in English, though music in the pub is loud enough to render most of their discussion unintelligible to the staff and other customers.

Meeting B’s eyes, he drops his voice even lower. “That incident in Oymyakon that M16 called me for…that wasn’t an ordinary assassin ring she took out. It was probably some branch of the Matryoshka organization. It must have been when they got her.”

He frowns a little at his own words. _Why was she after them in the first place?_

* * *

The sweet tang of cherry on toast grounds B as he considers Lawliet’s words, like a detective for a moment. It’s easier, in the buzz of the crowded pub, where A isn’t hanging over his shoulder. Lawliet’s ankle pulsing gently against his. “And the police are in on this, somehow, or at least whoever runs the racket has them under their thumb.”

 _That explains some things, about how she was acting at the time. Then again, was it really that different from how she was normally?_ Anger swells in B, tempered by a desperate curiosity.

He struggles to keep his voice casual, “So that would have been ‘95, huh? Sounds like the project’s been going on for a while, at least. What do you know about how long it takes to…break in that kind of programming? I saw her just the year before and she seemed, well. Same as ever. Better, even.”

 _More human than I’ve ever seen her. I thought…I thought she cared about me then. Thought I cared about her._ B lights a cigarette, almost through an entire pack for that day.

_Guess I’m here, aren’t I?_

* * *

 

L scrapes his bowl of risotto clean and pushes it aside, pausing to take a sip of water before digging out his small notebook and flipping it open.  

“Not ‘95,” he murmurs, scratching down a date. “April '96 is when we went to extract her, though I suppose she might have been investigating them for a while."

[ ](http://66.media.tumblr.com/c8fd5e0d4aacb0bbc5d20412830ba300/tumblr_oe3dkn30a31vxcoefo2_1280.jpg)

_Timeline A, page 1_ [do not edit or repost]

 

Pausing to chew on the end of his pen, he remembers how A looked when they used explosives to break into that compound: as confident and sure of herself as ever, but exhaustion darkening her eyes, and her body much thinner than he remembered, like a skeleton forced into too-tight skin.

And then those bodies around her – not just dead and dispatched of, but ravaged. So much blood that M16 burned it to the ground.

"And that’s the same period when her moves as Deneuve became erratic. If these Matroyashka people did successfully program her, that could explain why her Deneuve work turned so unpredictable."

 _January 1979_ , he writes, staring at his sloppier-than-usual penmanship. "A was born in Russia, though. Her mother fled the country when she was five, but never did say why. She wouldn’t give me their family name, either. Just Frasier, the name of the man she married.”

He writes down a few more dates, the one he remembers with sharp clarity. August 1991 – when he recruited A from a children’s group home in Detroit. May 1994 – when B left England, and shortly after that L and A first slept together, clumsily and without much planning.

 _May 1994._ L writes the letters and numbers too hard, ink bleeding together.

"There’s something else important. Something I always wanted to tell you, when the time was right.” He drops the pen and tugs on the ends of his hair, staring through the strands at B’s alert, nearly wary eyes. “A year or two before I went to Detroit to meet her, A murdered her stepfather. And she was never caught – not until I picked up his cold case file.”  

He takes another sip of water, clears his throat. “She would have been eight or nine.”

* * *

 

“Fucking Christ, Lawliet. Is this how you chose all your allies?” B’s lip curls into a cruel smile before he can stop himself. He regrets it almost immediately when he sees the way Lawliet flinches across the table, fingers shaking slightly.

“Oh shit, look I didn’t mean it like that–”

“B–” He snatches at Lawliet’s hand before something angry can slip out, then runs his fingers overtop of Lawliet’s tremble. _God, that’s what the drugs will do to you._

“S’okay. It’s just…a lot.” He bites his lip hard, and Lawliet nods, fingers running clumsily over the dried blood on the inside of B’s wrist. _God knows. Even though I didn’t kill my dad. I’ve never been clean. And I’ve always known A would be the same._ That’s _why Lawliet chose us._

He looks small, almost swimming in B’s jacket, despite them being close to the same size. B wants to gather him up, lock up away on a soft bed until the grey fades from his skin, the black fades from his eyes.

B settles for gathering his thoughts instead.

“Look, I knew—thought she was a piece of work since we were kids. But I always thought it was just, y’know, dumb jealousy. That I was just imagining it,” He takes a long exhale  “I wish you’d told me.”

_I thought we told each other everything, then. I guess you’ll always have your secrets. You and A both._

He lets go of Lawliet’s fingers reluctantly, not wanting to get into a bar fight. “Can we get out of here?”

* * *

 

_“I wish you’d told me.”_

L swallows back a rising bubble of bitterness. _You never really gave me the chance._

Secrets and trust are currency to people like A – to everyone, really, in some fashion or another. From the moment he met her, L was certain that A would only ever trust him if he chose to hold on to the power of that secret and never reveal it. He had planned to tell B anyway, when the time was right, but B left before that time ever came.

B drops L’s hand and scoots his chair back. “Can we get out of here?”

L nods and puts enough rubles on the table to cover the bill. Outside, the summer evening is less warm than usual, and L lets out a shiver despite the protection of B’s jacket.

 _“Is this how you choose your allies?”_ The question’s still ringing in his head.

“She knew how to get away with murder, but she thought what she was doing was noble. Her stepfather was an abuser, and since no one else intervened, she did.” He says the words quickly as they cross the street in step, heading for their hotel.

“I’m not sure either of us can claim to be any better, anyway,” he finishes quietly, pushing through the entrance.

[ ](http://67.media.tumblr.com/444da54e4452b879e8cef3976c69aeac/tumblr_oe3dkn30a31vxcoefo1_1280.jpg)

_Timeline A, page 2_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

 

**June 7, 1998 [11:01pm]**

Wedy and Mello are in the hotel room together when they finally return, Mello in his bed and watching reruns of some Russian television show – _The Alaska Kid_ , L thinks – while looking on the verge of nodding off. Wedy is reading a paperback while blowing smoke rings out the window, her blonde hair tied back in a red scarf.

She looks up at them with the cigarette still clamped between her teeth.

“You two look like hell.”

[ ](http://66.media.tumblr.com/f435b5af0391a3e3d271dd3f68836514/tumblr_oe5c9nxKYH1vxcoq1o1_1280.jpg)

_Stitches from Liars_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

  **June 8, 1998**

B wakes slowly in the late morning, perceptive only barely of Lawliet’s hand, tangled in his hair. The gentle sensation that tugged his mind away from the gunshot memory reel spinning away in the dead of night. A had both haunted him, and kept her distance, but he feels rested enough. The fire in his chest has faded to a dull, knotted ache. Something that feels like the guilt of a lie turned true. _God, after all that shit, I still feel like I owe her._

_I guess I can pay that debt with justice, even if I can’t forgive her._

He pulls the hand out of his knotted curls, kissing the palm before setting it on the rise and fall of Lawliet’s chest. Lawliet’s eyelids flicker gently, and B rolls over to check the glow of the clock. _11am. Guess it’s enough time_.

“Morning. Looks like we both slept enough, huh?” a smile crawls up B’s lips, as he see “I’m guessing we’ll need it, for what’s coming.”

* * *

“Mm.” L murmurs and stretches his arms overhead, wincing when the stitches in his shoulder strain and burn. Wedy stitched him up after his shower last night. The wound had been a little deeper than he realized – he’ll have a scar, just one of many, but this is the first he’s gotten with B in years. An unusual way to commemorate the rekindling of a relationship, yes, but unusually appropriate for them.

After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he sits upright and crawls back into the sweatshirt he got rid of at some point in the night. The curtains in the room barely hold back the bright summer sun.

“Where’s Mello?” he asks, staring at the other bed. It’s empty, and rather sloppily made.

“Wedy’s room?” B suggests just as the coded knock sounds on their own room’s door. Wedy and Mello poke their blond heads in, the former carrying a cardboard tray of hot drinks, the latter clutching a white paper sack of what L guesses are pastries. Mello looks rather pink-cheeked, too – almost happy, like there’s something keeping him warm that’s more than just access to hot showers and hot meals.  And Wedy – L glides his gaze over to her and finds her eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses. She’s wearing the jacket that she favors when she has two pieces holstered.

“Good, you two are decent,” Wedy drawls, _tsking_ a little when L pushes the sheets aside and reveals that aside from the sweatshirt, he’s only wearing boxers. “Well, good enough I guess.”

“Coffee?” L reaches for a drink from her tray, along with several packets of sugar, and Wedy passes the other cup off to B.

Once he has his coffee all doctored up the way he likes, L takes a long sip and starts over the rim of his cup at Mello. “You got up early,” he says, because he heard the boy get out of bed at just after seven. L has always been a light sleeper.

Mello nods and roots around in the paper sack for a pastry that both looks and smells like _pain au chocolat._

L turns his eyes to Wedy again, though his words are still meant for Mello _._ “I’m guessing that Wedy took you on another outing, then. How’d you do at the range?”

Wedy gives a casual little shrug and pushes her sunglasses onto her forehead. ”You didn’t take his gun back. Figured someone should show him how to use it before he accidentally winged one of you jerks, or worse, me.”  Her blue eyes fall calmly on L’s. They both know that he’s not cross.

“Good thinking. Thank you,” L says through another swallow of coffee. “Mello?” He gives the boy his most earnestly wide eyes.

* * *

 Mello pulls his pain au chocolate out of the bag before passing the rest of the pastries off to Lev. “I got to pick them,” he says almost proudly, before focusing back on pulling apart his on pastry and piece full of chocolate into his mouth. The sugar melts on his tongue—a delicacy that he’s still not quite used to.

His eyes flick to Lev, Rue, and then Wedy, almost as if he’s asking a silent permission before speaking. Mello knows that no one has made any attempt to take the gun back from him. Still, despite the near blessing everyone seems to have given him to use the thing, he’s hesitant to acknowledge it in his own words.  

Lev, when he was sleeping without his sweatshirt on, bore a nasty cut sealed shut by even nastier stitches. Mello doesn’t say a word about it, but his eyes drift to his shoulder, a silent prayer running through his head. With these three surrounding him, he feels like he has some fucked up semblance of a family, be it temporary or not. It’s a quick jump, from distrust to attachment, but it’s a risk Mello’s hardly even aware he’s taking.

He wants Rue and Lev to stay safe. Alive.

Even now, a good thirty or so minutes since the’d left the range, the sound of gunshots ring in Mello’s ears, and the lingering recoil from his gun has his fingertips tingling. He adores the rush that the firing range gives him. The thrill, especially, of hitting his mark. Of succeeding. In his chest, in the back of his mind, he craves more. Wants to learn, improve, surround himself in these things that Rue and Lev have made their lives. Lives that, up until now, he thought only existed in fiction.

Mello swallows, and his mouth twists into a wide grin. “It’s so cool,” he says, his eyes wide, brimming with a genuine excitement that he hasn’t felt in so God damn long. Mello almost feels high off of the adrenaline.

Mello shoves another bit of pastry into his mouth, and brushes the crumbs off on the side of his jeans. “I hit the target in the middle a couple times,” he adds, some sort of proof that he is, in fact, improving. Absentminded, he takes his free hand up to his neck to play with the rosary beads peeking out from the collar of his shirt.

* * *

 “I thought you’d be a natural at it,” B grins ear-to-ear, taking the pastry that Mello offers, “Nice choice. Who knows, before long you might even replace Lev.”

He winks exaggeratedly at Lawliet so that the joke stays between them, but Mello smiles at him like sunshine, so that’s good for a start. Lawliet is nibbling at the pastry with a kind of precision that B recognizes as a sign a plan is hatching. He takes a sip of the coffee that Wedy offers.

“Alright, so we think we might know who nabbed your friend, Peter– who’s cooking up the drugs that killed him,” at B’s words, Mello’s face darkens to a kind of lethal resolve B knows too well, “We’re going to get him, promise. And I think Lev has a plan for what to do.”

* * *

 L is less warmed by Mello’s smile than B is. Yes, it’s good to see the kid smile a genuine smile, but he knows that it isn’t borne so much of true happiness as it is borne of relief. After being weak and degraded, power is in Mello’s hands at last – and he’ll cling to it. And he might never feel as if it’s enough.

 _Just like you’ll never have enough_ , the ghost of his subconscious whispers, a sound L doesn’t hear at all but sends a fine tremor through his hands, one that disappears as soon as he slips the end of his thumb between his teeth.

“It does sound as if you’re a natural,” he murmurs, flaking apart his pastry with his free hand. Mello smiles again at what he perceives to be a compliment, and L waits until he’s swallowed the last of his breakfast before addressing him again.

“Mello, if you want it, I can have you on a plane to Heathrow tonight.” And with that, the boy looks up the calm seriousness in L’s voice. “A man called Watari will pick you up and take you to the school. You’ll be well-treated and given as much food as you like. A room of your own, too. You’ll even be allowed to continue your weapons training, if it’s what you want.” L smiles a little, though he can feel how it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “I’ve heard there’s another boy there who’s a crack shot, though I think he’s mostly learnt from video games.”

L feels B lean forward beside him, likely curious as to where he’s going with this. Wedy only looks out the window, smoking and drinking her coffee.

“You can also stay with us until we’re finished here in St. Petersburg.” L draws a small piece of chocolate up to his mouth and sucks it from his fingers. “But if you stay, you’ll be a part of this.” L nods in B’s direction. “Rue thinks you’re useful, and so do I. But being useful is your choice, not ours.”

He swallow a bit of bread and meets Mello’s icy blue eyes. “If you stay, know that you won’t sit on the sidelines. There _will_ be a part for you.”

* * *

 It’s tempting. _God_ , is it tempting. There’s an end in sight, and opportunity that Mello can’t even begin to imagine. He nods along, solemn. To him, it’s not so much about being useful as it is about his own selfish vendetta.

“I want to go to Heathrow,” Mello voices, and then rolls his head to look at Rue. “But I want to stay.” If Rue and Lev are going to find who’d been responsible for Peter’s death, then Mello has an obligation to stay. If it’s spilt blood, then so be it. He wants this man’s dues to be paid, by whatever means necessary. Though Mello is safe, Peter is still dead. His memory is distorted—kindness rotted away by bottom of the barrel drugs that make bile want to rise from Mello’s stomach.

He has a debt to Peter and a debt to these two, who have done so much for him.

“I’ll do anything you need,” Mello adds, not with desperation but an almost feral need. He’s vengeful—how many God damn times has he heard that in his life? Scissors in a little girl’s eye and his nails down Rue’s face. He’s hurt, still, and he has the animalistic desire to make someone else hurt just as badly.

 _God is forgiving, but God is vengeful and abhorrent._ Mello’s beliefs twist to his desires–justification in the form of a distorted blessing.

With decaying flesh imprinted behind his eyelids and the taste of death on the back of his tongue, he cannot refuse. He’ll learn, in England. For now, he’ll pay his dues and bring some semblance of a proper end to Peter’s life. Mello’s not sure if his friend would be proud, but it’s his own decision to make.

Now, looking at Rue with fire in his veins, he chooses vengeance.

* * *

 


	9. June 8 1998

**June 8, 1998**

The State Hermitage is busy, as it always is in the summer, which gives the group of them safety in numbers. They choose the Rembrandt room to stage the meeting, which is, as always, packed with tourists. Most of the viewers’ eyes slide over the paintings with barely a second between them. The gold-framed images, smelling delicately of century-old linseed are old hat to them.

B, for his part, has never fully gotten used to it. Mello is by his side, and he watches Lawliet lingering over _Sacrifice of Isaac_ , one finger jammed beneath his lip. Wedy takes her place beside him a moment later, the crowd keeping them just visible. From beside Wedy, the ghost of A winks, then glares ugly at B.

He forces himself to look away.

B and Mello take a view in front of Rembrandt’s _Danae_ , the soft flesh of Rembrandt’s wife wearing his mistress’ face brought to life for the classical myth. He leans over to Mello, who has noticed the perforations at the base of the woman’s feet “You know this painting was stabbed, eh? And sulfuric acid thrown at it?”

“Why?”

B shrugs gently, “People see and do things that don’t make sense sometimes, I guess.” _The restoration put it right, though the scars are still visible._

He scans the crowd, honing in on the name _Rolf Voigt_ as it flashes by. The man is tall, sharp Aryan features, with a frown somewhere between cruelty and curiosity. He’s staring right at Lawliet and A, who B notices, are still acting unawares. When B glances back, the doctor has the smile turned on him.

B forces an easy smile back. _Time to reel him in._

* * *

 

Sensing movement from B, L slowly turns his head until he can see him from his peripheral vision and pick up the hand signal: _target in sight_. L doesn’t bother to look at the crowd and try to pick out who the Doctor is, he merely touches Wedy’s wrist, quickly guiding his A decoy into one of the more quiet hallways, the walls lined with rich hanging tapestries.

“You can stop,” a curiously high pitched voice says. It belongs to a man in a dark suit, his blue eyes piercing, his face thin, nearly skeletal. Dr. Rolf Voigt, L assumes. “I know that isn’t Anastasia under that ball cap.”

Wedy tilts the hat to one side a little and smirks. “Damn right,” she says under her breath.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anyone named Anastasia.” L slouches over and buries his hands in his pocket. “Who is it you think you’re looking for?”

“Anna Frasier.” The doctor neatly folds his hands together, smiling in a way that does nothing to warm his icy eyes. “I was her physician when she was born, and then again when she was a teenager. We fell out of touch over a year ago, but I was grieved to hear of her passing. Now –” the man takes a step forward, more in confidence than as a threat “– I believe we should forego the secrecy and discuss this matter directly.” Those cold eyes fall on L, appraising him like something under glass. “I can see that you are a shrewd young man, with a good deal of power under your belt. It is the only explanation for how Anastasia came to answer to you.”

“What matter are we discussing, then?” L asks, scratching the back of his neck but otherwise scarcely changing his expression. “It’s Anna’s diary that you want, isn’t it? It says a lot of things about you, your drug running, and your Matryoshka project.”

Another smile slithers across the doctor’s features. “Yes, but nothing conclusively incriminating. I fear that Anastasia’s investigation didn’t go very far if it only led to me.”

L tilts his head, comprehension passing through him. “You read the diary.”

A chuckle. “My dear, it was I who suggested she start keeping one. But I’ve very much enjoyed watching you piece her fragmented thoughts and clues together. You and your partner are highly skilled, considering that you’re ordinary humans.”

 _Ordinary._ It’s not an insult, just a fact.

“Then if it’s not the diary that you want, I guess it must be us.” L shifts his gaze up and meets eyes with B, who has just come up behind the doctor. “Right, Rue?”

 

Mello is tense beside him, a grit in his jaw starting to form. “Settle down,” B whispers, “We might need to play nice to get him to reveal his hand. Make him think we have something he wants. Stay cool. Wait. Listen. We’ll get him.”

Mello nods seriously, puts a decent but grim poker face on. _Still a natural._ B arranges his face to blank, paints his mind to black, and catches up to the three of them inside the tapestried hallway.

_Catherine Hermitage [do not edit or repost]_

 

“ I can see that you are a shrewd young man, with a good deal of power under your belt. It is the only explanation for how Anastasia came to answer to you.”

 _Great, so that’s where the stakes are._ The man doesn’t let on that he knows who Lawliet is, who L is– but he’s close. Revealing L’s identity might be the largest gambit next to losing his life. _It’d probably kill him to stop the detective work, anyways._ B moves in to put the heat on, just as Lawliet calls him over.

“You were bugging us, weren’t you? Seems like you want answers from us just as badly as we want them about Anna.”

“That’s one conclusion you could draw,” the doctor eyes flicker over the four of them, but he doesn’t _look_ nervous. _I’m guessing he’s got others watching us right now. Maybe even the police._

“But let’s not talk about what’s _incriminating_ right now. My partner and I… we’re curious about what you can do. No doubt, seen to Andrei since we’ve seen him– or maybe who you spoke to doesn’t call himself Andrei anymore,” B circles the group in slow, careful steps to contrast with Lawliet’s keen focus, Wedy’s wary boredom, and Mello’s stiff, blank face. _Set him off balance ._  “Neat trick. He said Anna was like him too. But I’m guessing she was one better, at least. Especially if you had her since she was a kid. ”

“Her mother took her out of our grasp before she was a finished product. Results tend to be…more positive if processing is completed when they are younger. Or at least in the early stages.” Voigt’s smile widens with an evident curiosity, “She may have been volatile, but evidently still exceptional. I’m guessing she attracted your attention?”

“I’ve always wondered what was it that made her so…unique,” B matches tone with Voigt’s hungry curiosity. _This is a man who would chop up kids’ brains to turn them into killers._

_And we’ve got to make him think we’re like him._

“That would seem unwise to disclose, especially here. I’m curious about your interest, though.”

 _Damn. Should have known it wouldn’t be that easy._ B smiles slowly, like he’s considering what the doctor presents him with, and catches Lawliet’s eye.

Lawliet speaks slowly, keeping his face even, “We’re interested in your…research, and its applications.”

“What exactly are you offering?” Voigt arches his brow with practised skepticism.

* * *

 _Make him think we have something he wants_.

 _If you choose to stay, there_ will _be a part for you_

Mello understands that Peter’s nastiness wasn’t natural. That fucked up look in his eyes and that fucked up shit he pumped into his body was nothing close to ordinary. And in front of him, Mello sees the cause. In his pocket, his Beretta sits like lead.

 _I have to do something_.

If this isn’t time to make use of himself, he doesn’t know when else is. Mello clears his throat in the same, timid farce that he’d put on for Lev and Rue the first time he’d stumbled into them. A smile is near impossible, but he forces it onto his face. He wants to spit venom in this man’s eyes and watch him writhe as he goes blind. Mello wants to see blood _pour_ from his body.

“Rue and Lev have been taking care of me the last few days. Peter’d help me before that,” he says, hoping that the name will ring a bell. As if to say, _“No one will miss me if I disappear.”_ Mello swallows his dignity, swallows his beliefs, and extends his hand to the doctor. A contract. An offer. “I wanted to be just like him. I want to be _better_.”  

Peter was brilliant.

A was brilliant.

Mello, others have told him, has the potential to be brilliant.

His words seem to pique the curiosity they need. Voigt’s hand is large and surprisingly warm around his—a distorted comfort in the face of a chilling reality. If Rue miscalculated, he’s fucked. There’s an obvious interest written all over Voigt’s face, and he sinks to Mello’s level to get a better look at him. To _analyze_ him. It’s disgusting, and Mello has to force himself not to look away.

“And your name, child?”

He swallows, hand still caught in a grip that could be his downfall. _I don’t want to die_. “Peter would call me Mello.”

While Mello’s face sits blank, every part of his body is telling him to _run_.

* * *

 

Hearing Mello offer himself over to Voigt makes L’s stomach go heavy. He shouldn’t have to do this – he’s so young, he should be kept from these kind of ugly battles for a little while yet. But having seen Mello’s kind of fury, his kind of grit, L knows that he was born with the veil already ripped from his eyes: for too many, there isn’t much more to life than ugly battles.

L feels some relief, too. Mello has just saved him from having to offer the boy up as a specimen, which is what he planned to do from the moment the B and the doctor started bargaining.

“He hasn’t been with us long,” L directs to the doctor, who is still bent down to assess Mello. “But his unique skills and cleverness were immediately evident.” He smiles in a way that he thinks might match Voigt’s coldness. “Just like Anna’s was evident when we found her in Detroit.“

The doctor straightens up and turns his assessing gaze on L, now. _You might have been an excellent specimen, too,_ those icy eyes seem to say, and L only widens his eyes and smiles a little more.

“I have my car out back. Would you and your associates care to accompany me to my office, Mr Lev? We can put things in order in private, that way."

"Of course,” L nods.

As they leave the Hermitage, L wonders who Voigt thinks he’s dealing with, based on the scraps of conversation he might have gathered from his surveillance. A’s superior, yes, but L also suspects that Voigt has no clue that “Lev” and “Rue” are on the side of law enforcement, and instead mistakenly believes that they are both movers and shakers in the criminal underworld – potential allies.

Two different but overlapping worlds, and sometimes you need to have your fingers on the pulse of one in order to to any good in the other.

* * *

 _This is way bigger than just Ace…_ B shifts uncomfortably in his seat, Mello tucked between him and Lawliet as they pass the Neva, turning into the residential area of the city. Wedy sits in the front. It’s the safest, and she’s also the quickest draw of the four of them. B’s eyes are starting to flicker in and out with every lethal movement he’d seen A make. Through the sunroof the monster from the graveyard flies above him, but even A’s ghost has left him now.

 _Keep it together. For Mello._ The kid’s tense all over, but Matryoshka might belong to the government and it might belong to organized crime, but B’s instincts say the doctor is only the start of it. In his peripheral vision, he sees Lawliet cross his left pinky over his ring finger.

 _He’s not going to die tonight._ B signals back with a curl of his right index. _Which might make our life difficult. Or not._ Lawliet seems grimly pleased with the response, for now.

 _Time to get what we came for, at least._ "Was Anna like Andrei?”

“What do you think he was?” Voigt seems amused, with a touch of pride as he turns the steering wheel.

“I know a thing or two about hiding in plain sight, taking on different faces,” B “There’s a big difference between that and believing you are someone else. Remembering only the things that person remembers.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it? We had a lot of success with that brand of conditioning,” Voigt smiles in the rearview mirror, and B smiles back, “Anastasia was good at pretending she could, and if we had completed her development, she would have no doubt been the most accomplished of our agents.”

“What caused the malfunction?” Lawliet plays the part well, cool eyed curiosity.

“She was unable to assume tabula rasa– none of her identities were particularly well formed. It interfered with her performance.”

 _It interfered with who she was._ B realizes, thinking about how much A seemed like several different people, hardened over by a desire to get the job done, be the best, take no survivors.

B knows a thing or too about not knowing what you are. And learning what that is… at one point he can imagine how that would have broken him. He can imagine it vividly.

They pull up in front of an innocuous clinic, concrete and very few windows. Voigt unlocks the door, leads them through the empty, blue-painted lobby to a small office with a heavy-looking door in the corner.

“I’ll explain some details of the research in the back room. We can begin as soon as today, when our terms are settled. You’ll have to excuse me if I ask you to provide your weapons,” the doctor says smoothly. B grits his teeth, but drops his Desert Eagle on the table with a nod. When he pulls out the Fallkniven, Voigt’s eyes linger over it with suspicion.

Behind him, A’s eyes sparkle. She knows about the stiletto hidden in B’s boot.

* * *

Wedy unholsters her firearms and unpockets her knives, a deep frown on her face. L only has the Beretta on him, but he lays it out on the table with the other weapons.

"And you?” L keeps his fingers just touching the gun barrel.

“I am unarmed.” Voigt removes his suit jacket and smooths down his shirt and trouser pockets, turning the latter out so that a puff of lint falls to the floor.

L nods and pulls back his hand. Off to the side, Mello is frozen, not at all moving for the gun L knows he has hidden inside his too-big, bunchy clothing, and when Voigt circles near him, it’s only to rub his fingers together at the ends of Mello’s golden hair.

“How old are you?"

"Nine in the winter.” Mello sounds as if he’s speaking through a pinhole, his voice raspy, his eyes wide in a way that the doctor probably takes for fear.

L knows better.

“You looked younger.” Voigt stops touching the boy’s hair and turns away, seeming a little disappointed. “Follow me, please.” He crooks a finger and unlocks the door at the back of his office. It opens onto a laboratory of sorts, clean and austere, with two computers and various pieces of medical equipment, and a small refrigerator – for whatever cocktail of drugs he uses, no doubt. In one far corner, L spots a sleek white pod which he suspects is a sensory deprivation chamber.

“As you can see, there’s nothing terribly frightening here,” Voigt says, spreading his arms wide. “While our work once required more severe methods, in the last years I’ve found that a far more gentle procedure yields better results. It’s all about creating the right neurological state."

Despite the doctor’s attempts at a calm bedside manner, L can sense B’s wariness, reaching out like tendrils to coil together with his own. It doesn’t matter how gentle the procedure is, it amounts to the complete manipulation of other people’s memories and minds.

_And what else do we have to tell us who we are?_

* * *

 

“It’s a very brave thing you’ve agreed to be part of,” the doctor addresses Mello, motions for him to sit on a small examination table, “This will give you advantages you need– no ordinary human will ever be your rival.”

Mello doesn’t flinch, to his credit, but B very much wants to _get the hell out_ , right now. It’s one thing to improvise to save himself and Lawliet, quite the hell another to do it weaponless and with Mello involved. _At least he’s armed. And Wedy’s got her eyes up. We’ve just got to keep an eye out, get enough so that Lawliet has something to go off of on Matryoshka._ It’s too big to stop now, and B knows that.

 _But starting something might get one of us killed._ B well knows there’s only one candidate in the room right now for that.

“Now, for your part,” the doctor steps away from Mello, assessing B and Lawliet with a measured glance, “As understood from Anna, the two of you have a great deal of power, specifically in intelligence and wealth. I will demonstrate to you that my research can work wonders towards the efficiency of your practice.”

“In return, I require more stable funding. The drug running became necessary after Anna’s…restructuring failed rather spectacularly. With only a handful of surviving specimens, we were forced to get creative. It is a waste of our energy. And quite frankly, it leaves our branch at a liability.”

 _Branch?_ B and Lawliet exchange a brief glance, Lawliet’s eyes glimmering with that familiar hunger to _know_ , understand, unravel this mystery. _Matroyshka._ The word is whispered in his ears.

“We’ll give you a quarter of what you need to…enhance Mello,” Lawliet runs a hand along the sensory deprivation chamber, then cases a sharp glance to Voigt, “But we will need results.”

“I understand. Before we can begin the process, I’ll need to take blood samples of young…Mello, was it?” the doctor looks mainly at Lawliet, as if Mello isn’t even in the room, “Not that a nickname will matter. I’m sure his previous identity won’t be of much use.”

B moves forward instinctively, clenching a fist, almost revealing his hand when the doctor moves towards Mello. Luckily Voigt seems too excited by the prospect of a new patient to notice. B tries to catch Mello’s eye, but the boy’s gaze is straight downward, his shoulders visibly tense.

Wedy tenses too, even, when the doctor pulls out the syringe, uncapping it into a medical disposal. B casts a glance to Lawliet, questioning him with an old gesture. Asking for permission. _Give me the signal._

 _Not yet._ Lawliet signs back. _Damn him._

“Relax.” the doctor advances, “Once the process is complete, you won’t remember what brought you here, or even what hurt you in the past. You will simply know what you _must_ do, and you will be unstoppable at it.”

But the boy has his hand in his jacket, eyes aflame with _what he came for_ , and B just manages the good sense to get _out of the line of fire._

* * *

Disgust is a foul taste in Mello’s mouth, and he waits. Waits and waits for Rue, Lev, _someone_ to interfere. But the cap is off of the medical syringe, and Mello’s body is rigid, telling him to get the fuck _out_. But out isn’t an option, and Mello’s hands are itching to make a move.

The needle kisses Mello’s vein, and his finger kisses the trigger of his Beretta. Gunfire rips through his ears, echoing harsh vibrations through his veins. All the way through his limbs and through his head—a dull, throbbing satisfaction that has his eyes wide and his mouth dry.

When blood spills, pooling around Voigt’s ribcage, fear strikes itself through the center of his chest. Mello scrambles off of the examination table, a harsh “Fuck _. Fuck!”_ pouring off of his lips. He doesn’t look at Rue or Lev for a signal. All he sees is blood dripping over the ground, and his finger itches to pull the trigger again.

Christ, how badly he wants to put a bullet right into Voigt’s skull. And he can. He fucking _can_.

Mello has his own idea of justice—a bastardized, tainted thing that tastes of revenge and bloodlust.

There’s one hand on his rosary with the other on the trigger, his gun pointed right between Voigt’s eyes. This man can’t have his memories.  Mello clings to his hurt, and clings to what it’s made him. Without Peter, he would have had no chance of survival. And with no rage, he’d have nothing that would have given him the drive to stay alive.

He’s not going to get stuck like Peter, and he’s not willing to let his friend die in vain.

Mello poises his gun for a shot right between the eyes.

Voigt moves, and he fires. Metal connects with shoulder, and Mello’s head is swimming with a grotesque high that should have been disgusting rather than exhilarating.

* * *

L watches the scene through a slow motion haze, and it’s remarkable, really, how very unsurprised he is when gunfire rips through the air, when Mello flings himself off the table, aims, and fires again.

L remains motionless, except to slide his gaze onto B, whose curiously watchful expression seems to mirror his own.

Voigt doubles over, gripping his bleeding shoulder as he staggers across the floor, then drops to his knees, his blue eyes icy and piercing, but no match for Mello’s.

 _But Voigt lives,_ L thinks when he realizes that neither he nor B are making any moves to disarm Mello, to stop him from emptying the rest of the chamber into Voigt’s body. _Who stops him?_ He swings his head around to check the laboratory door, half-expecting a previously hidden bodyguard to charge in _._

But a blur in his peripheral vision answers the question. Wedy comes behind Mello, pulls his arm back and smoothly pries the gun from his grip, tucking it into the waistband of her trousers.

“That should do it for now.” She rests a hand on Mello’s trembling shoulder. “Or don’t you want to help Rue and Lev with the interrogation?”

* * *

 

Wedy’s sharp words jolt B out of his fascinated reverie. _So easy to trust the numbers for you, isn’t it, baby bird?_ He had been angry at A when she had said it then, and he glances up to raise an eyebrow at her ghost, who smirks back at him.  

Voigt isn’t moving though. He isn’t even screaming. B hurries to his side, taking note of the pulpy mess that was his shoulder, but his eyes seem curiously blank.

_Like a broken doll._

“Dr. Voigt, do you know who we are?”

No response.

 _Christ_. “He’s switched out. Probably did…whatever it was on himself, or else he’s not the top dog here, just another puppet. Lev, check the cabinets, any files we can learn from?”

Lawliet is already rummaging through with practiced efficiency, but it might not be enough. Behind the table, Mello lets out a raw gasp that sounds like he’s been holding in for the past minute. _Shit._ It all comes up on B in a rush. _The kid may have seen shit before, but that doesn’t mean shooting someone is going to make it any better._

 _At least he doesn’t kill Voigt. That we know._ B tries to hold on to that certainty.

“Wedy, can you make sure he doesn’t bleed out for me?” B sidles away from Voigt for the moment, kneeling in front of Mello, “Hey, hey you alright Mello?”

Mello nods almost violently, and B slowly puts a hand on his shoulder, “You did great, alright?”

* * *

 

“I’m sorry,” Is the first thing out of Mello’s mouth while he tries to ground himself with the sensation of Rue’s hand on him.

Part of Mello wants to sob because of the sight. Another part, because it’s something that he’s caused. He’s not sure, really, if it’s disgust or joy. Instead, he swallows again, again, trying to force down the lump in his throat that feels like it’s about to smother the life out of him. He’s horrified by the sight of Voigt’s body, rather than the monstrous urge that had encouraged him to pull the trigger.

It’s not guilt, but nausea, that overcomes him.

It’s unbelievable, how good he’d feel if not for the gore.

But Voigt, now, is useless. Mello hadn’t waited for them to act, and he’s stuck trembling, staring wide eyed at Rue. _God fucking damn it_.

Mello chews on his tongue, trying to form words. He needs to keep moving—the gunfire was so God damn loud that _someone_ had to have heard.

And part of him, still, wants to watch Voigt die. But Wedy is trying to stop the blood flow, and those bullets didn’t go anywhere where they could kill.

 _Not a good enough shot_.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, and the lump in his throat is that much larger, that much more constricting. “I acted too fast.” Always, detrimentally influenced by emotion.

 _Could have done better_.

Around him, everyone’s moving, but Mello’s world feels like it’s frozen still. “What can I do?” he asks, and his eyes float from Rue, to Wedy, then to Lev. _Anything to help_.

* * *

 

L finds some medical supplies in one of the cabinets so that Wedy can get to work on staunching the doctor’s wounds. The flow of blood is steady but not dangerously so, indicating that no major arteries have been hit, at least. While she takes care of that, he grabs a few promising files from the filing cabinet, and a collection of floppy disks from the desk. The computers themselves are encrypted, and there’s no time to try to break into them.

“What can I do?” Mello asks in a small voice, and L can see from his pale, wide-eyed look that he’s not doing well. Not in shock – not yet – but not well.

L peels off his hooded sweatshirt and puts it around Mello’s shoulders. “Sit tight and take some deep breaths. We’ll be out of here just as soon as we can be.”

B examines a security camera up in a high corner with a doubtful expression on his face. “Not sure we can do anything about these now.”

“I know that model.” L squints at it, keeping his distance. “The footage will be grainy, and given the number of weapons we unloaded in the office, we’ll hopefully be taken for another crime syndicate.”

Two dark-haired teenagers, a blond woman in a baseball cap, and a street orphan with a gun. _No more chasing A’s ghost all over Russia. Time to flee the country._

Wedy has Voigt cleaned and wrapped up reasonably well, so L drops to a crouch before him and studies his blank, glassy eyes, which look far less piercing now that the pupils are so blown. From his jeans pocket L removes his small notebook and flips over to the page of hexagram illustrations. Showing them to Voigt causes no reaction, just continued slow breathing. He almost seems relaxed.

“However he was programmed, it wasn’t with hexagram triggers. And that makes sense – if he was using them on others, he wouldn’t want to be triggered himself.”

“Matryoshka ’s got to be a lot bigger than this guy, then,” B observes, then his voice drops slightly. “Guess that’s what Ace must have figured out, in the end.”

L nods and comes to his feet. “Let’s clear out before anyone else shows up. Once we’re far from here we can call in for an ambulance, just in case.”

 

 


	10. June 9, 1998

**June 9, 1998**

It’s not the fastest B has even tried to get out of a country, but it’s damn close.

Lawliet waits till they’re safe outside of the city limits, in the small private airport before calling the ambulance. It’s safer that way, but a little petty. B can tell Lawliet’s unsatisfied with the resolution, itching to unravel the unanswered questions raised by Matroyashka. _But it’s not safe for us here anymore._ Well, it’s not as if Voigt won’t survive, B is sure. But it won’t be pleasant.

 _I guess you got something like revenge after all, Ace._ B eyes Mello, who remains tight-lipped and shaky. B would guess this isn’t the first time he’s seen blood before. _He got something like revenge, too. Probably feels good. Maybe._

“We headed to Winchester?” B murmurs under his breath after Lawliet hangs up, “I think I ought to see Mello off, at least.”

Lawliet nods stiffly, looking almost lost for a minute. B wants to reach for Lawliet’s arm, kiss him gently on the forehead, but now doesn’t seem like the time or place.

“We’ll talk,” he says as gently as he can manage, “I’m not going anywhere, not if you don’t want me to.”

He squeezes Lawliet’s hand, just briefly, and Lawliet gives him a tiny smile. _I’m not letting you go this time._

That thought carries them to the chartered jet, the city of St. Petersburg thankfully fading into the mist of the clouds. Lawliet already has his feet up on the seat, chewing on licorice and scribbling in several notebooks. Mello has one hand on the window, eyes alight with something like wonder, but his fingers are still white-knuckled against his knee. B takes a seat next to him.

“You doing alright, Mello?” B passes the kid a foil-wrapped chocolate bar from the fridge in the back.

* * *

 

The amazement that should have came with flying in a plane is dulled, masked by a restlessness that comes with what feels like unsettled revenge, the sight of blood, the aftermath of something so much less satisfying than Mello’d hoped. Because really, he’d wanted Voigt to die.

There had been satisfaction in blowing a hole in the doctor’s shoulder, and the dull look that struck his eyes.

Revenge tasted lovely, but what feels like lack of success has Mello bitter. He clenches his fist, unclenches, and rolls his head to the side. He hardly registers Rue talking, despite everything around him being just a touch too loud and a touch too clear. Mello’s ears are ringing, and his head is rushing with thoughts that seem to say everything but mean nothing.

“I’m okay,” he says softly, and pulls the candy bar from Rue’s hand. The cold is somewhat comforting against his fingertips—a sensation that reminds him for a moment that he’s here. That everything’s over. That he’s living. _I’ll be okay_.

Peter would be proud of him. But even the thought of Mello’s best friend is tainted, haunted by what he’d seen with Voigt. He’ll say a prayer later that in death, Peter’s somewhere better.

Now, Russia is long gone, and where there should be relief, Mello only feels anxious. This change is something he can’t possibly comprehend—something so far out of reach that it seems almost unreal. The orphanage Rue and Lev are bringing him to must be something abnormal. Especially considering that the two of them had come from it. Expenses seem to be nothing.

Hell, the law seems to be nothing.

“Where will you go next?” he asks, tearing the foil from part of the chocolate bar and then bringing it to his lips. Between his teeth, he breaks a corner off and lets the candy melt on his tongue. “Will you stay in England for a while?”

* * *

B catches the slight hope in Mello’s eyes and bites his lip, “I don’t know. Depends on a lot of things. There’s not a lot that’s certain, in this kind of work.”

He casts a glance over to Lawliet, who _looks_ completely engrossed in his notes, but B can tell he’s listening out of one ear. B wonders if they ought to stick around a bit, maybe talk things out after they land.

 _It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Taking a rest in Winchester?_ B pushes that thought to the back of his mind. There are lots of memories that _aren’t_ nice about Winchester. _There’s a reason I haven’t gone back_.

And B’s not sure a walk down to the river will wash the blood from his hands. _No, I can’t stay too long. Especially not before I know Lawliet is with me._

He and Mello fall into a comforting silence, while he rifles through the stack of major newspapers that Lawliet requested for the ride back. Almost automatically, he flips to the crime reports. Unusual spike in street violence in Italy. _Interesting. And staying in Europe would probably be good so I can be close to London–_ he ruffles the pages slightly, a panic taking hold of his throat. _What if he doesn’t want this? Doesn’t want me?_

 _I want to come back to you, B._ Lawliet’s words, whispered to his skin in the heat of the moment, wander back to him. People have said a lot of things like that to B, during sex. None of them mean a damn thing. _But Lawliet…_

Had he meant that? B slips away from sleeping Mello, taking a seat next to Lawliet. He places a hand tentatively on Lawliet’s arm, and it feels like letting out stolen breath when Lawliet turns to look at him.

“Hey. I said we’d talk,” B says quietly, then waits.

* * *

 

“Here?” L lifts an eyebrow, which B responds to with a slight nod, his expression serious, his hand whispering against L’s arm.

From listening in to the conversation with Mello, L can put together what B wants to talk about. _What comes next?_ He feels put on the spot, but asking for time to think seems unreasonable, given that he’s been turning this over in the back of his head all along.

“I’m going to keep a file open on Matryoshka. I’ll ask Lenny and Q to see what they can dig up on Voigt's floppies, though I expect that it will be a slow process.” He traces his finger over the cover of his notebook, thinking of A’s diary, buried deep in his luggage. “The FBI’s requested a conference call about a case in Baltimore…”

On that, L looks up and catches a shimmer of elusive emotion in B’s eye. “Yeah.” He shifts in his seat and pushes his notes aside. “I know that’s not what you meant.”

Closing his eyes, he briefly rests his head against the round window, listening to wind whistle along the fuselage. In Las Vegas, B had been perfectly content to say goodbye, to part as friends.

_I was the one who wanted more... who gave you permission to want more, in turn._

“I may have followed you to Vegas and then Russia, but now I’ve got my own caseload to get back to.”

He still remembers every last word of B’s note – the one he’d left behind when he fled England. _If you’re going to leave again, B, I’d rather you just do it now._

“You’ve made a life for yourself, too, and I’d understand if you want to return to it and not look back.”

* * *

 

The warmth of Lawliet’s arm feels like a thin and tenuous lifeline, the rest of his body curled up against the window. Tense, and almost miles away. B doesn’t move his hand, though he wonders if he should. His breath catches in his throat. _I can’t be wrong about him._

_Not again. I can’t let him leave me alone I can’t–_

_‘You’re not alone’._ Another whisper in his ear, the ghost of Vegas whispering to him. It forces the honesty out of him, though he’s terrified of being wrong. Wrong about Lawliet being just as terrified as he is.

“I don’t want to go back to a life that you’re not in, Lawliet.”

Lawliet’s hunched back loosens a tiny bit. He unfolds himself from the window, placing one hand carefully overtop of B’s. He catches B’s eyes, and half-mumbles, “Don’t want you to, either.”

“Thank god,” B whispers, resting his forehead against Lawliet’s for a breath of a moment. _Thank god thank god._

 _I don’t know what I would have done if you said no._  

After a moment of Lawliet’s breath steadying him, he pulls back a moment to look at him, their fingers still tightly entangled, “For work on my end…I was thinking about taking a case in Italy– it’s a little closer to London than my usual. Assuming you’re still planning to stay based out of there.”

He swallows, gaining confidence at the measured way Lawliet’s eyes stay on him, a little softer around the edges. “I could come see you, if you wanted.”

* * *

 

All at once L feels too warm, profound exhaustion and relief washing through him in equal measure. B’s emotional state is pulling him closer to the sugar-spun side of whim and romance, but that’s just fine. They can work out the logistics of this arrangement later, when they’re finished basking in its arrival.

For now, he can just breathe in the smell he knows so well – warm cigarette smoke and leather – and squeeze B’s hand all the harder.

“Yeah, I’m in London. Marylebone, in fact.” He shifts back into his seat, more comfortably this time. “I purchased it from Wammy a while back. Changed it up a lot since you and I first watched _Batman_ there.” He smiles, remembering the first night they spent in the West-end penthouse, gorging themselves on popcorn and having a lively discussion on the characters afterward.

“I _do_ want you to come see me.” He raises his eyebrows a bit. “Often. Do you have to go to Italy straight away?”

B flashes a smirk, but L can see from the the way he ducks his head that he’s pleased. “Well, the best thing about being an unknown, un-private detective is I can keep whatever schedule I want.“

When Wedy and Mello both appear to fall into naps, twenty and forty minutes later, respectively, B and L make out like they’re both thirteen again. And maybe, for that moment, they are.

The jet lands at a private airfield not far from Heathrow, where Wammy awaits them in his Bentley, along with sandwiches and a six-pack of coca-cola. “He’s the headmaster of Wammy’s House,” L whispers to Mello helpfully as they all crawl into the back seat. “But the deputy headmaster, Roger, is the one you have to worry about.”

They drop Wedy off at Heathrow, where she’s parked her motorcycle. “Call me if you ever want to hit the shooting range,” she says to Mello, an un-lit cigarette already clamped between her lips. “Wammy has my number.”

Mello’s gaze is serious and unreadable as they watch her head into the darkness of the parking garage, a can of cola fizzing in his hand.

“Winchester’s about an hour from here,” B says when they get out onto the motorway. “And as for Wammy’s House, let’s just say you’ll know it when you see it.”

* * *

 

The way Wedy departs is nothing close to dramatic, and Mello thinks that he might prefer it that way. She doesn’t hug him, and leaves looking just as disinterested as she had before. He gives a nod in response, and focuses on the cool touch of the aluminum can in his fingertips. _I’ll miss you_ , he almost wants to say, but there’s no opportunity, and the words feel strange, stirring around in his mouth.

Outside of the window, Mello watches the motorway fly by, fascinated by an environment that really, doesn’t look all that different from the Russian motorways. Paved in tar, it’s two separate worlds that look nearly the same. But here, hope has Mello’s head light and his stomach crawling with an excited anxiety that he’s not quite sure what to do with.

It doesn’t quite set in that he’s so far away from where he started. First, Chechnya, then Moscow, and a whole ton of shit in St. Petersburg. Mello tries to imagine Wammy’s House, and surely it must be something spectacular, but until the last week or so, he knows he’s barely experienced anything spectacular at all.

But these people are abnormal, and Mello’s more than content in putting his trust in them. For an hour, he shifts between staring out the window, and sneaking glances at Rue and Lev, content in their own bits of silence and conversation.

 _I want to be just like them_. He decides, and he’ll push for it. _Just like Rue._ It seems ridiculous, near impossible even. But outside of the very same home that they’d grown up in, Mello feels like he can do anything.

Outside of the gates, Wammy’s House has Mello’s eyes blown wide, trapped in a haze of wonder and disbelief that keeps words from spilling out of his mouth. “Oh,” he whispers, whipping his head back to stare at Rue with bright blue eyes. Back and forth, his head rolls between the sight of gates, and what looks like a beautifully stunning mansion. It’s almost like picture books he’s seen of old English houses—large, beautiful things with expansive lawns, and an architecture that has a smile spreading over his face.

“You grew up here?” Mello says, but it’s almost nearly to himself in an attempt to soak everything in. “How many other people live here?”

* * *

 

“Maybe thirty or so other kids, little bit less. The teachers come in from Winchester, and all over the world. Most of ‘em have talents, some like yours. They’re all orphans, though.”

B feels the memories gathering thick in the back of his throat as he stares at his childhood home. _It’s been years._

 _I can’t go back in just yet._ Judging from the slightly sick look on Lawliet’s face, his refusal to look at B, he’s feeling much the same. _We’ve still got those scars. Maybe in time._

“Look, we can’t stick around, Mello,” B kneels down to look Mello in the eye, “We have some respects to pay, and then a case to wrap up.”

The kid’s face falls a little, disappointment clouding his vivid blue eyes. _I want to give him something to hold on to in all of this._

_I mean, he doesn’t have someone like Lawliet. Not like I did. He’ll need someone to show him around, look out for him. He’ll have to find that himself._

“I’ve got something for you, though,” B reaches around in the deep pockets of his jacket for the rusty key that he’d never been able to throw away. _Like a lot of things that stuck with me, here_ , “There’s a room on the third floor, first on the left. Used to be mine. You’ll have to ask Wammy if you can use it, I don’t know. But if you look in the wardrobe, there’s a secret panel at the back– and that’s where you can find my old map of Wammy’s, and Winchester. I dunno if the old fort in the forest is still standing, but maybe you can find that too. I guess there’s probably more than a few mysteries still kicking around back there. Sound good?”

Mello’s eyes shine for a moment, and he nods wordlessly, taking the key with an air of wonder. The old man Wammy gives B a curious and serious look, but doesn’t comment.

“I’ll keep in touch,” B squeezes Mello’s shoulder briefly, then stands to watch Wammy walking him to the front door. He looks smaller than he did in Russia. _But now he’s got somewhere to go_. B digs in his pocket for a Marlboro, something familiar to calm his nerves. He gives Lawliet a steely-eyed glance.

“Can we go to her grave?”

* * *

 

L watches in silence as B passes the old key over to Mello. He has nothing of his own to give the boy, but perhaps it’s best that way. If he ever needs a reason to feel altruistic, he can always focus on how B’s gift to Mello is essentially what his gift to B had been: a home, a life, a family – even if it’s a bit of a fucked-up version of all three.

“Yeah, we can go to her grave.” He purses his lips and regards B carefully, the way he fumbles with his lighter. “You sure you’re ready?”

“Yeah. Rather put it her behind us now. If you’re okay to go.” B squints through the plume of smoke rising between them.

L nods and approaches Wammy, who’s near the front entrance helping Mello gather up his paltry amount of belongings. “Can I borrow the Bentley for a little while? Not sure how long B’s saying, but we’ll take it back to Marylebone.”

“Of course.” Wammy passes the keys over, but he’s gazing over at B, leaning against the car with his cigarette. “You know, seeing you two together again… it’s like no time has passed at all.” He looks at L head on, his eyes glinting behind his glasses. “I imagine it doesn’t feel quite like that for you.”

L rubs his index finger between his lips, smiling inscrutably. “Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.”

Wammy only nods. “Let me know when you need me. I’ll keep an eye on our new student.”

“Cheers.” L gives Mello a nod, noticing how he’s still got B’s key clenched in his fist. “Take care.”

L takes the wheel and drives them the short distance to Magdalen Hill Cemetery, just off the road on the way to Winchester proper. “Didn’t know where else to bury her, really,” he says, pulling the Bentley up to a set of grand but rusty gates, sliding the gearshift into park.

He stares at his fingers looped around the steering wheel. “It was hard to know what she would have wanted. Be cremated and have her ashes tossed off the Cliffs of Dover? Sunk to the bottom of the sea? In the end, we just put her close to home.”

* * *

 

B bites his lip, thoughts of A shifting in his mind as he unbuckles his seatbelt, “Look, I think even she didn’t know what she wanted most of the time. How could she, with what they did to her?”

Lawliet doesn’t answer, but the question runs through his mind as they slowly pass through the gates. _How do we know we were even seeing the same Ace, after all this time?_ It would be easy, too easy to separate the cruel-eyed girl who put herself between him and Lawliet at every turn from the quiet and certain woman who seemed so desperate for him, at times.

 _But maybe she was always desperate for something._ B wishes he could feel angry about what she did, or perhaps at Matroyashka for destroying her, but the hollowness in his chest feels bottomless. He glances back and forth, against his best efforts, hoping for a last glance of the memory-monster of her ghost.

The ghosts have faded into the moor-mist that’s crept into the cemetery. It’s just them. _For now. Hopefully for always._ B knows it’s for the best. His footsteps feel heavy against the dewy grass.

“I guess I’ll still fucking miss her,” he says to no one in particular, then steadies himself to meet Lawliet’s “God, Lawliet. She was the worst of us and the best of us. I’d have hurt her if she was still with us, but still. I didn’t want her dead.”

_Even though I knew she always would be, by now._

“There’s the grave,” is all Lawliet says, softly. He squeezes B’s hand, though. The grave is simple, white stone carved with _Anna Frasier, 1978-1998._ Nothing more.

“Solved your mystery, Acey,” the words come more naturally than he expects, “Opened another. But here we all are, together again. Knew this moment would come since ’91. Didn’t think it’d be like this.”

“But here we are, together again,” his lip curls, in a way that’s almost spiteful. He can’t quite help it, tightening his grip on Lawliet’s brittle fingers, “Thanks for that, I guess. And for saving my life.”

_Maybe you destroyed it too, but just the same…_

_Sorry I couldn’t do the same for you._

* * *

 

L doesn’t have much to say to A’s headstone, but then again, he’s been here before. But the last time he was here he thought he had Anna Frasier pretty well sorted out, and now there’s holes in his certainty. That diary…the things she’d said about him, about “L” and “Lars.” It seemed as if she’d hated him, at least some of the time, but was that her or was that some other, bitter fragment of her psyche?

 _Fragments, that’s right._ It’s a waste of time to even dwell on it, on what he could have done differently. It was never down to him, anyway. He takes in a deep breath and shoves his hands further into his pockets.

“Feels like we ought to make some grand gesture,” he finally says, lips tilting with amusement, any lingering concern whisked away by the warm breeze. “Not sure what suits, beyond having a fuck on her grave or something.”

B’s solemn expression shifts over to a slightly wicked grin. “A kiss might do it, on that front.”

And with that he sweeps L into his arms and rakes his fingers through the back of his hair, kissing the breath out of him. L kisses back, snaking an arm inside B’s jacket and squeezing his ribcage, relishing in his warm, familiar scent. Cigarettes. Coffee. Something wild and mossy.

“What do you think?” L asks into B’s hair after a moment. His head is resting on L’s shoulder now, his gaze trained away from A’s grave. “Back to London?”

“Yeah. Back to London.”

_What we had/ what we have left [do not edit or repost]_

* * *

 

The hollow feeling in B’s chest loosens by inches as the miles burn up the road behind him. There’s a ghost of deja vu in the scenario, driving for miles with a lover beside him, like he used to do with A.

But this time, it’s Lawliet who has his white fingers tapping on the wheel, and he’s got one hand draped over the seat on to Lawliet’s shoulder. Lawliet is smiling, just slightly at the corners of his lips.

And it doesn’t look painted on at all. _Lawliet might lie, but his smiles never do._

They don’t talk much, on the drive there. It’s enough just to be with. Before long they’re in the barely-familiar garage at Marylebone, in the heart of London. _Elevator looks just the same_. Beyond eyes the brass gates in the old apartment.

Lawliet’s penthouse, however, is a completely different story. The posh, antiquated furniture has been replaced with clean, modern saturated blues, black and white. The wall between the kitchen, dining room, and the living room has been torn out for a vast open-concept space. The still-life that used to hang in the bedroom hangs on the wall, along with a few other paintings that B recognizes, but apart from that, it doesn’t look like the old man’s apartment anymore.

B lets out a low whistle, “Really did the place up, didn’t you?”

He kicks off his shoes and steps out onto the cool hardwood, snaking a hand down Lawliet’s back and pulling him in for a teasing kiss. _Nice to finally be alone again._

_No ghosts, just us against the world._

“So, you wanna give me the tour?”

* * *

 

“Sure.” L tugs B by the hand and leads him through the kitchen and dining area. “And yeah, I spent a lot of Saskia’s money on the remodel. And the security system alone –” he trails off, smiles. “Well, I’ll show you how it works later.”

He starts off with the study, keying in the security code, then waiting five seconds to key in the backup code. Formerly a dark-paneled room with heavy curtains and stout leather furniture that smelled of ancient cigars, now the walls are a pearly grey and feature a highly efficient network of built in shelves and cabinets. The wide windows that look out over London are uncovered, though automatic shades in the ceiling can be lowered to prevent the three computer monitors from catching the sun’s glare. The largest of the three is actually a LCD screen mounted to the wall.

“Command central.” L points at some of the locked cabinets along the floor. I have two servers in there. Q has the backups at her own place.” He runs his fingers along the top of the cabinets, the familiar surroundings washing him with a wave of satisfaction. “Q’s been with me for over a year now, and she and Lenny got together a few months ago, though you’ll remember her as Lenore.” Recognition flutters over B’s face at the mention of their old classmate.

L heads back out into the hallway, shutting the security door behind them. “The bedroom I used to sleep in is usually on reserve for Q and Lenny, and the master bedroom is mine, now.” He opens the door directly across from the study. “This is where Wammy sleeps, but I put most of A’s things here before I left.”

He flicks on the overhead lights as he enters, the soft glow of halogen revealing a Scandinavian platform bed covered in an appropriate Nordic quilt. The long, low dresser along the wall has an AR-15 rifle case resting on it, along with a tactical pistol backpack and grappling gear. “Those were hers,” he says, pointing. “There’s also a suitcase full of clothes in the wardrobe – everything from frothy dresses to filthy coveralls.”

L walks to the other end of the dresser, where a sheaf of papers and photographs is held down with a heavy silver lighter. “If I’d known you were still smoking, I’d have brought you this when I went to Vegas.” He picks the lighter up, turning it over to study the engraved scorpion on the case. “Seems your style,” he remarks, tossing it to B.  

* * *

 

B catches the silver lighter deftly in one hand, turning it over with a bit of melancholy, “It was mine, actually. Used to light hers with it sometime. Guess she took a fancy to it,” it feels much weightier than it used to.

“Bought it because it reminded me of you, you know?” he says to Lawliet’s shoulder, _I always was masochistic like that._ _Ace knew, too, that it reminded me of him._ His lip twists a little bitterly.

 _Probably why she took it._  “Maybe I should take some of her dresses, call us even on that front.”

He tries to grin devilishly at Lawliet but his discomfort must show on his face, because Lawliet steps closer to him, resting his hand on the small of B’s back. B skates his fingers over the files and photographs, lingering over a polaroid of A, likely from Lawliet’s camera.

Her behind a curtain, skin empty of the scars he remembers. _Wouldn’t have been too long after I left,_ he realizes with a clench to his gut. The name and date above her face is wiped clean. Cigarette on her hand, looking as dangerous and elusive as ever.

 _Guess it’s hard to know who you can trust, at the end of the day._  He should say something, about her, about it all, but the words are stuck in his throat. _Or maybe I’ve said all I can._ He fumbles a Marlboro out of his pocket, then hesitates a moment before lighting it, “This okay?”

_Are we okay, right now?_

* * *

L watches the cigarette roll between B’s fingers, nodding. “As long as you don’t smoke around the servers. I installed a high-end filtration system – knew I’d have to, if I was going to keep hiring Wedy.” He gives B a knowing smirk, then follows his gaze to the mess of papers and photographs that the lighter had previously been resting on.

“Oh yeah, found that in her things, too.” The polaroid has an over-exposed look to it, A’s face cut off just at the eyes. L picks it up and fans it a little. “I wondered, actually…did you take it?”

The photograph looks like it was snapped by a lover. A’s mouth is soft, poised for a smile, and she’s dressed in a skimpy tee shirt that barely hides anything. Her fingers touch the gauzy curtain beside her, but it’s hard to tell if she’s peeling the fabric back to reveal herself, or just about to duck back behind it.

_Always hard to tell, with you. Not that I ever let you know…_

“No.” B’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “When I saw it I figured you were the photographer.”

L shakes his head lightly. “I never took her picture.” _Never wanted to._

B smiles even though it looks like he might be trying not to. Not too hard, anyway, and not too soon. L has taken B’s picture before, and he hopes that he’ll be able to take it again. Maybe tonight.

Still – he glances at the photograph of A one more time. It looks like her lips might be lined with faint traces of lipstick. Her favorite shade, maybe. 'Red Pony.'

_I never did find where your Red Pony ended up, Anna._

That’s okay. He found something better.

“Why don’t you finish that in my bedroom?” L hooks his arm around B’s hips and draws him in for a smokey kiss, their teeth nearly clicking together as they smile near-simultaneously.

Dragging B toward the door, L blindly drops the polaroid back onto the dresser, where it misses and drifts to the floor.

_Anna Frasier 1978-1998_ [do not edit or repost]

 


	11. September 1998, Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An epilogue....

**September 17 1998**

 

Mello pushes the door to Rue’s old room open with bated breath and his heart in his throat.

“It’s dusty as fuck,” Matt grumbles behind him, his face buried in his handheld.

“Shut up, it’s _cool_. This is where Rue used to stay.” Still, Matt is hardly impressed. Mello is more than content ignoring him and pacing around the room a few times before heading to the wardrobe. It’s not so much the room, but the _maps_ that he’s interested in. He tries to imagine Rue and Lev years younger, playing in the yard outside, or talking on the floors of their rooms with books and games between them.

“Mello, come on,” Matt groans. “Hurry it up, man.” 

“Cool it, Jeevas, I just gotta— _found it_!”

On the floor, they spread out papers that have Mello’s eyes wide, and Matt’s attention finally away from his game. The maps smell of age, and Mello traces his fingers over everything with a delicacy that he rarely has anymore.

“We should go in the woods,” Matt says with a crooked smile, and his goggles pushed up onto his head. Mello laughs too loud, taken aback by the idea of Matt even _wanting_ to go outside in the first place. But hell, he isn’t about to complain. Grasped between his thumbs and index fingers, Mello picks the map up, and they scurry their way out.

It’s Matt, in the forest, that speaks up first. They stand in the middle of a mess of sticks, some longer than others, and some stacked in an attempt at a pattern. Maybe, a fort. Or maybe, nothing at all. “What’re we gonna do with it?”

Mello tries to think, but he can hardly picture what this mess would have looked like. “It’s a wreck, either way,” Matt adds, and Mello shrugs.

“We could fix it.”

“Just like theirs?”

“Yeah.”

Matt shakes his head. “That’s boring as shit.” His fingers are itching to do something, tapping against his jeans and then snaking up to grasp at the hem of his shirt. “We’ll just make a better one.”

 Mello learns quickly that Matt doesn’t care much for the past, and has no intention of letting it take up his time. Mello can’t bring himself to be so blissfully forgetful.  

Still, his lips stretch into a smile when Matt kicks over what could be the remnant of a wall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That concludes "Hermitage for Children and Liars," though there are more beats in this series to come! 
> 
> We hope you enjoyed! Again, for a little roll call...
> 
> L/L Lawliet: lowlawliet.tumblr.com (written by Tartpants)  
> B/Beyond Birthday: noirberryjam.tumblr.com (written by Sybilius)  
> Mello: sirota-krysa.tumblr.com (written by Gyakugire)  
> A/Anna Frasier: alpha-aeterna.tumblr.com (written by veeraga)
> 
> Comments are very, very welcome. :) Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> More chapters to come. In the meanwhile, we love comments and feedback! :)


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